The origins of visual perception of touch.

Touch is the primary way of learning about the surrounding word from prenatal life throughout infancy (Field, 2001). Inside the womb fetuses frequently touch their body and evidence has shown that these gestures are coordinated and well organized (e.g., Reissland et al., 2013). Given the importance of touch during development, in this study we explored the origins of the ability to visually recognize touching gestures involving others. Looking times and orienting responses were measured within a preference looking task. In Experiment 1 2-day-old neonates and 3-month-old infants were presented simultaneously with two videos of a moving hand approaching a static face: in one video the hand touched the face (touching gesture), in the other the hand stopped before touching occurred (no-touching gesture). Differently, in Experiment 2 2-day-old neonates saw the same two videos but the static face was replaced by another hand while in Experiment 3 neonates saw a moving spoon, instead of a hand, approaching a static hand. In Experiment 1 only 3-month-olds, but not newborns, could differentiate between the two stimuli, as shown by longer looking times and more frequent orientations towards the touching vs no-touching gesture. Conversely, newborns preferred to look towards the no-touching gesture when a static hand instead of a static face was displayed (Experiment 2) and this preference vanished when they see a no-social touch (Experiment 3). These results demonstrate that somatosensory-motor associations accumulated in the womb are sufficient to allow newborns to link executed with observed touching gestures