Body Perception in Newborns

Studies investigating body ownership and awareness in adults have highlighted the importance of the temporal synchrony and spatial congruency of sensory stimuli, in addition to body morphology and anatomical posture. These studies show that body-related cues, here defined as information attributable to the current position of one’s own body, are fundamental for body perception. Despite several studies on infants that have shown the important role of proprioception (where movements are self-produced) and multisensory integration in the development of body awareness during infancy, to our knowledge, only one study has investigated the role of body-related synchrony detection during infancy solely based on afferent information.