Newborn Body Perception: Sensitivity to Spatial Congruency

Studies on adults have demonstrated that the perception our own body can be manipulated by varying both temporal and spatial properties of multisensory information. While human newborns are capable of detecting the temporal synchrony of visuo-tactile body-related cues, it remains unknown whether they also utilise spatial information for body perception. Twenty newborns were presented with a video of an infant’s face touched with a paintbrush, while their own face was touched either in the spatially congruent, or an incongruent, location. We found that newborns show a visual preference for spatially congruent synchronous events, supporting the view that newborns have a rudimentary sense of their own body.