Body representation in infants: Categorical boundaries of body parts as assessed by somatosensory mismatch negativity.

There is growing interest in developing and using novel measures to assess how the body is represented in human infancy. Various lines of evidence with adults and older children show that tactile perception is modulated by a high-level representation of the body. For instance, the distance between two points of tactile stimulation is perceived as being greater when these points cross a joint boundary than when they are within a body part, suggesting that the representation of the body is structured with joints acting as categorical boundaries between body parts. Investigating the developmental origins of this categorical effect has been constrained by infants' inability to verbally report on the properties of tactile stimulation. Here we made novel use of an infant brain measure, the somatosensory mismatch negativity (sMMN), to explore categorical aspects of tactile body processing in infants aged 6-7 months. Amplitude of the sMMN elicited by tactile stimuli across the wrist boundary was significantly greater than for stimuli of equal distance that were within the boundary, suggesting a categorical effect in body processing in infants. We suggest that an early-appearing, structured representation of the body into 'parts' may play a role in mapping correspondences between self and other

Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques

The emergence of social behaviors early in life is likely crucial for the development of mother–infant relationships. Some of these behaviors, such as the capacity of neonates to imitate adult facial movements, were previously thought to be limited to humans and perhaps the ape lineage. Here we report the behavioral responses of infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to the following human facial and hand gestures: lip smacking, tongue protrusion, mouth opening, hand opening, and opening and closing of eyes (control condition). In the third day of life, infant macaques imitate lip smacking and tongue protrusion. On the first day of life, the model's mouth openings elicited a similar matched behavior (lip smacking) in the infants. These imitative responses are present at an early stage of development, but they are apparently confined to a narrow temporal window. Because lip smacking is a core gesture in face-to-face interactions in macaques, neonatal imitation may serve to tune infants' affiliative responses to the social world. Our findings provide a quantitative description of neonatal imitation in a nonhuman primate species and suggest that these imitative capacities, contrary to what was previously thought, are not unique to the ape and human lineage. We suggest that their evolutionary origins may be traced to affiliative gestures with communicative functions

Higher-level goals in the processing of human action events

The concept of a goal critically separates dynamic events involving humans from other events. Human behaviours are motivated by goals, which are known to the actor but typically inferred on the part of the observer. Goals can be hierarchical in nature, such that a collection of sub-goals (e.g., getting a mug, boiling water) can be nested under a higher-level goal (e.g., making tea), which can be further nested under an even higher-level goal (e.g., making breakfast). The diverse set of talks in this symposia all highlight the foundational role that goals play in action processing and representation. Eisenberg et al. detail how online prediction of others’ goals shapes observers’ sampling of information during action observation. Howard and Woodward provide evidence that children’s memory for non-human events can be facilitated by priming children with their own goal-directed actions. Loucks and Meltzoff highlight the importance of goal structure in children’s memory for complex action sequences. Finally, Cooper presents a computational model to explain the emergence of goal-directed action hierarchies

Interpersonal Influences on Body Representations in the Infant Brain

Within cognitive neuroscience, there is burgeoning interest in how the body is represented in the adult brain. However, there are large gaps in the understanding of neural body representations from a developmental perspective. Of particular interest are the interconnections between somatosensation and vision, specifically infants’ abilities to register correspondences between their own bodies and the bodies of others. Such registration may play an important role in social learning and in engendering feelings of connectedness with others. In the current study, we further explored the interpersonal aspects of neural body representations by examining whether responses to tactile stimulation in 7-month-old infants are influenced by viewing another’s body. During EEG recording, infants (N= 60) observed a live presentation of an experimenter’s hand or foot being touched. During the presentation of touch to the adult’s hand or foot, the infant received a brief tactile touch to their right hand or right foot. This resulted in four conditions: (i) receive hand stimulation/observe hand stimulation, (ii) receive hand stimulation/observe foot stimulation, (iii) receive foot stimulation/observe hand stimulation, and (iv) receive foot stimulation/observe foot stimulation. Analyses compared responses overlying hand and foot regions when the observed limb matched the stimulated limb (congruent) and did not match (incongruent). In line with prior work, tactile stimulation elicited a somatotopic pattern of results in the somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) and the sensorimotor mu rhythm (6–9 Hz). Cross-modal influences were observed in the beta rhythm (11–13 Hz) response and in the late potential of the SEP response (400–600 ms). Beta desynchronization was greater for congruent compared to incongruent conditions. Additionally, tactile stimulation to the foot elicited larger mean amplitudes for congruent compared to incongruent conditions. The opposite was true for stimulation to the hand. This set of novel findings suggests the importance of considering cross-modal effects in the study of neural body representations in the infant brain. Continued work in this new area of infant neuroscience research can inform how interpersonal aspects of body representations may serve to undergird early social learning

Why do dogs (Canis familiaris) select the empty container in an observational learning task?

Many argue that dogs show unique susceptibility to human communicative signals that make them suitable for being engaged in complex co-operation with humans. It has also been revealed that socially provided information is particularly effective in influencing the behaviour of dogs even when the human’s action demonstration conveys inefficient or mistaken solution of task. It is unclear, however, how the communicative nature of the demonstration context and the presence of the human demonstrator affect the dogs’ object-choice behaviour in observational learning situations. In order to unfold the effects of these factors, 76 adult pet dogs could observe a communicative or a non-communicative demonstration in which the human retrieved a tennis ball from under an opaque container while manipulating another distant and obviously empty (transparent) one. Subjects were then allowed to choose either in the presence of the demonstrator or after she left the room. Results showed a significant main effect of the demonstration context (presence or absence of the human’s communicative signals), and we also found some evidence for the response-modifying effect of the presence of the human demonstrator during the dogs’ choice. That is, dogs predominantly chose the baited container, but if the demonstration context was communicative and the human was present during the dogs’ choice, subjects’ tendency to select the baited container has been reduced. In agreement with the studies showing sensitivity to human’s communicative signals in dogs, these findings point to a special form of social influence in observational learning situations when it comes to learning about causally opaque and less efficient (compared to what comes natural to the dog) action demonstrations

Is It Rational to Assume that Infants Imitate Rationally? A Theoretical Analysis and Critique

It has been suggested that preverbal infants evaluate the efficiency of others' actions (by applying a principle of rational action) and that they imitate others' actions rationally. The present contribution presents a conceptual analysis of the claim that preverbal infants imitate rationally. It shows that this ability rests on at least three assumptions: that infants are able to perceive others' action capabilities, that infants reason about and conceptually represent their own bodies, and that infants are able to think counterfactually. It is argued that none of these three abilities is in place during infancy. Furthermore, it is shown that the idea of a principle of rational action suffers from two fallacies. As a consequence, is it suggested that it is not rational to assume that infants imitate rationally. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

How to Do Things Without Words: Infants, utterance-activity and distributed cognition

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants’ cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact

Eliciting imitation in early infancy

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Delayed Imitation of Lipsmacking Gestures by Infant Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta)

Human infants are capable of accurately matching facial gestures of an experimenter within a few hours after birth, a phenomenon called neonatal imitation. Recent studies have suggested that rather than being a simple reflexive-like behavior, infants exert active control over imitative responses and ‘provoke’ previously imitated gestures even after a delay of up to 24 h. Delayed imitation is regarded as the hallmark of a sophisticated capacity to control and flexibly engage in affective communication and has been described as an indicator of innate protoconversational readiness. However, we are not the only primates to exhibit neonatal imitation, and delayed imitation abilities may not be uniquely human. Here we report that 1-week-old infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) who show immediate imitation of a lipsmacking gesture also show delayed imitation of lipsmacking, facilitated by a tendency to refrain from lipsmacking toward a still face during baseline measurements. Individual differences in delayed imitation suggest that differentially matured cortical mechanisms may be involved, allowing some newborns macaques to actively participate in communicative exchanges from birth. Macaque infants are endowed with basic social competencies of intersubjective communication that indicate cognitive and emotional commonality between humans and macaques, which may have evolved to nurture an affective mother-infant relationship in primates