However, we discovered that in the earlier weeks, infants engaged more often in what we called “complex touches.” Complex touches were touches performed across several body/floor areas in one continuous bout while the hand maintained contact with the body or floor. Infants also did not display significant differences in their rate of touch between right and left hand or between conditions. Until the age of 9 weeks, we found no consistent differences in the rate of touch between head and trunk. When we did not consider the specific areas touched, the rates of touches were higher to the body than to the floor, but the duration of contacts and the most touched areas were higher for the supporting surface than for the body. On most sessions, they produced up to 200 body/surface contacts and touched as many as 18 different areas (mainly upper body and floor) both hands combined. We found that throughout the 2 months of observation, infants engaged in a high rate of touch and spent about 50% of the time moving their hands from one touch location to the next. In this study, we followed weekly four infants in two naturalistic 5-min sessions (baseline and toys-in-view) as they laid alert in supine from the age of 3 weeks until they acquired head control. Very few studies have examined in detail the development of these early spontaneous touches during the first months of life. Both are critical for the formation of later goal-directed actions. Self-generated touches to the body or supporting surface are considered important contributors to the emergence of an early sense of the body and self in infancy. Department of Psychology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, United States. Connell, Matthew Clark and Daniela Corbetta *
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