Five-Month-old Infants' Discrimination of Visual-Tactile Synchronous Facial Stimulation

The distinction between self and other is crucial for self‐awareness and for our awareness of others. However, how human beings learn to associate the face they see in the mirror with themselves is still a matter of debate. The exploration of body‐related multisensory processing with infants has demonstrated that they can detect visual‐tactile contingencies, suggesting the presence of early implicit body perception simply based on the spatiotemporal matching between visual and tactile stimuli alone. In the present study, we used facial stimuli to investigate 5‐month‐old infants' visual preference for visual‐tactile temporal synchrony. Infants watched a side‐by‐side video display of a peer's face being systematically stroked on the cheek with a paintbrush. During the video presentation, the infant's own cheek was stroked in synchrony with one video and in asynchrony with the other. Our result demonstrates that 5‐month‐old infants are able to discriminate between visual‐tactile synchrony and asynchrony, by showing a visual preference for the synchronous facial stimulus.