How do the infants perceive their body? Do they feel the boundaries or do they live in symbiosis with that of others? Research of the last decades have shown that body awareness is a very early ability
In the past, several psychological theories have said that in the early stages of development, children are unable to distinguish themselves from others. Some supporters of this perspective have gone to formulate rather extreme positions: the child, at least initially, lives in a symbiotic state with his mother, experimenting with an “indefiniteness” of the body borders in which the parent’s body is a sort of extension of his own.
Although it is a doubtful vision, it is not enough to liquidate the question by claiming that it is unlikely that young children are unable to perceive the boundaries of their body. We need something more convincing.
Over the past three decades, several scientific evidence have been accumulated which have allowed us to give substance to the hypothesis that, in some way, children “know” to have a body.
To enter into the merits of the topic, however, allow me to start from the world of adults.
Us and the others
For an adult it is obvious that “being in the world” means having a body. There would be no sense of self, no inner life, without the perception of one’s body. Although this feeling is mostly outside of awareness, it constantly accompanies us.
If this were not the case, we would live the unpleasant perception of finding us “outside” from our body or to “confuse” with the body of others: The fact of clearly warning our body boundaries allows us to represent us as an entity separate from other peopleto distinguish ourselves from others.
In adults, the perception of the body derives from a myriad of signals continuously transmitted to the brain by the meaning organs, the vegetative system, the muscles, the joints. Through a multisensory integration processthe brain not only processes information on how the body moves or on its state of well -being, but can identify its boundaries and generate a unitary representation: A “bodily self”.
At this point the question is obvious: When does the child begin to have a perception of his body boundaries? When does it start to “know” to have a bodily self?
Scientific research
Several scientific studies document that the processing of bodily information is already present Starting from the first year of lifeand this seems to suggest that even if in a rudimentary form, very small children already have a perception of their bodily self.
But how is it possible to examine this perception? One of the roads traveled by the researchers was to “cheat” the child benevolently, showing him a part of his body in a different way from how it is actually.
Imagine a 5 -month -old child on a seat. In front of him there is a monitor which, through a video system, acquires and projects in real time The images of his legs. In one half of the screen the legs are projected in thesubjective orientation (ie as the child sees them); At the same time, in the other half of the monitor, through a manipulation of the images, the legs are projected on the contrary oriented compared to the point of view of the baby (ie as a person placed in front of him would see them).
Consequentially, While the child crashes, the two images return him a different visual information: The first is congruent with the signs that the muscles and joints of the lower limbs transmit to its brain (proprioceptive input), the second instead is in total contrast. How do children react in the face of this situation? Do they perceive some diversity between the congruent and non -congruent image? Or do they not take any difference?
Integrated information
Philippe Rochat and Rachel Morgan, the two researchers who organized the experiment in 1995, tried to answer these questions recording the time of attention with which children observed the images. A similar quantity of attention paid to both images would have meant that neither the congruence situation nor that of inconsistency activated a particular interest in the baby.
However, the results showed that Children tended to look longer by the image of their legs that moved in an incongruous way compared to what has been experienced at the proprioceptive level.
The fact that the children were surprised by these strange images is explained only if it is assumed that their brain is able to integrate information from different sensory channels, thus producing some representation of the body.
In other words, when in the course of the experiment they observed the inconsistent images, the proprioceptive and visual information was not tuned, and The children reacted more carefully to something unexpectedwhich diverged from their albeit sketched body scheme.
Competent children
This explanation is in line with what we said about adults: Multisensory integration is the requirement to generate a unitary representation of the body (the bodily self, in fact).
Starting from the experiment of Rochat and Morgan, several other studies of this type have been done, even with children of just a few days of life. Everyone leads to a similar conclusion: The ability to grasp the synchrony and multisensory asynchrony is a crucial ability for the development of the bodily self and the children seem, at least in part, to own it.
So, Since the first days of life, children have specific skills with which they process the body’s information. It is reasonable to believe that This ability allows the small child to distinguish himself from the rest of the worldso it seems unlikely to experience some “indefiniteness” of one’s body borders.
From the bodily self to the psychological self
The potential of perceiving one’s bodily self in thus early is undoubtedly A fundamental aspect of the development of the “psychological self”. For us adults, to perceive to “be in the world” as separate individuals, with one’s own subjectivity, it is possible to the extent that we “know” that we own a body.
The interesting thing is that From the early stages of life, even children “know”, in their own way, to have a body With which to be fully being in the world.
