Centre for Brain Science, Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 28;13(1):14091. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-41235-w.
Representing others' bodies is of fundamental importance for interacting with our environment, yet little is known about how body representations develop. Previous research suggests that infants have expectations about the typical structure of human bodies from relatively early in life, but that these expectations are dependent on how closely the stimuli resemble the bodies infants are exposed to in daily life. Yet, all previous studies used images of adult human bodies, and therefore it is unknown whether infants' representations of infant bodies follow a similar developmental trajectory. In this study we investigated whether infants have expectations about the relative size of infant body parts in a preferential looking study using typical and disproportional infant bodies. We recorded the looking behaviour of three groups of infants between 5 and 14 months of age while they watched images of upright and inverted infant bodies, typical and proportionally distorted, and also collected data on participants' locomotor abilities. Our results showed that infants of all ages looked equally at the typical and proportionally distorted infant body stimuli in both the upright and inverted conditions, and that their looking behaviour was unrelated to their locomotor skills. These findings suggest that infants may need additional visual experience with infant bodies to develop expectations about their typical proportions.
代表他人的身体对于与我们的环境互动至关重要，但对于身体代表如何发展，我们知之甚少。先前的研究表明，婴儿从生命早期就对人类身体的典型结构有预期，但这些预期取决于刺激与婴儿日常生活中接触的身体有多相似。然而，所有之前的研究都使用了成人身体的图像，因此尚不清楚婴儿对婴儿身体的代表是否遵循类似的发展轨迹。在这项研究中，我们使用典型和不成比例的婴儿身体，在偏好性注视研究中调查了婴儿是否对婴儿身体部分的相对大小有预期。我们记录了三组年龄在 5 至 14 个月之间的婴儿的注视行为，同时让他们观看直立和倒置的婴儿身体图像、典型和比例失真的图像，还收集了参与者的运动能力数据。我们的研究结果表明，所有年龄段的婴儿在直立和倒置条件下对典型和比例失真的婴儿身体刺激的注视时间相同，他们的注视行为与他们的运动技能无关。这些发现表明，婴儿可能需要更多关于婴儿身体的视觉经验，才能对其典型比例形成预期。
