Two experiments investigated infants' ability to localize tactile sensations in peripersonal space. Infants aged 10 months (Experiment 1) and 6.5 months (Experiment 2) were presented with vibrotactile stimuli unpredictably to either hand while they adopted either a crossed- or uncrossed-hands posture. At 6.5 months, infants' responses were predominantly manual, whereas at 10 months, visual orienting behavior was more evident. Analyses of the direction of the responses indicated that (a) both age groups were able to locate tactile stimuli, (b) the ability to remap visual and manual responses to tactile stimuli across postural changes develops between 6.5 and 10 months of age, and (c) the 6.5-month-olds were biased to respond manually in the direction appropriate to the more familiar uncrossed-hands posture across both postures. The authors argue that there is an early visual influence on tactile spatial perception and suggest that the ability to remap visual and manual directional responses across changes in posture develops between 6.5 and 10 months, most likely because of the experience of crossing the midline gained during this period.

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Spatial Localization of Touch in the First Year of Life: Early Influence of a Visual Spatial Code and the Development of Remapping across Changes in Limb Position.

Cerebral lateralization of function: from infancy through childhood.

Touch is the first of our senses to develop, providing us with the sensory scaffold on which we come to perceive our own bodies and our sense of self. Touch also provides us with direct access to the external world of physical objects, via haptic exploration. Furthermore, a recent area of interest in tactile research across studies of developing children and adults is its social function, mediating interpersonal bonding. Although there are a range of demonstrations of early competence with touch, particularly in the domain of haptics, the review presented here indicates that many of the tactile perceptual skills that we take for granted as adults (e.g., perceiving touches in the external world as well as on the body) take some time to develop in the first months of postnatal life, likely as a result of an extended process of connection with other sense modalities which provide new kinds of information from birth (e.g., vision and audition). Here, we argue that because touch is of such fundamental importance across a wide range of social and cognitive domains, it should be placed much more centrally in the study of early perceptual development than it currently is.

The Development of Tactile Perception.

4 – Mechanisms Underlying Instability in the Development of Hand Preference

Perceptual asymmetries in the somatosensory system : a dichhaptic experiment and critical review of the literature from 1929 to 1986

Lateral differences in habituation of ipsilateral head-turning to repeated tactile perioral stimulation following midline head restriction was studied in 44 full-term neonates. Left-sided stimulation had a significantly greater and faster decremental effect than right-sided stimulation. Even in the absence of tactile stimulation (Control Group), head-turning to the left decreased systematically whereas head-turning to the right did not. The transient efficacy of prior midline head restriction for the elimination of lateral differences in both spontaneous head movements and responsiveness to tactile input suggests that behavioral asymmetry is already well-established in the newborn.

Lateral differences in habituation of ipsilateral head-turning to repeated tactile stimulation in the human newborn

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/17/3/351.pdf

Phyllis Milner

Papers

Lateral differences in habituation of ipsilateral head-turning to repeated tactile stimulation in the human newborn

Lateral differences in the detection of touched body parts in young children.