Recent research shows that from the first minutes of life outside the womb, babies manifest a sense of their own bodies as differentiated entities among other entities in the environment (see Rochat 1997 for a more detailed discussion of experimental facts supporting this assertion). According to Neisser (1991, 1995; see also Rochat 1997), newborns manifest rudiments of a perceived or “ecological” self.
For example, in one study (Rochat & Hespos 1997) we showed that from birth, infants manifest a discrimination between tactile stimulation that is self produced (self-stimulation) and tactile stimulation from a non self, external origin (allo-stimulation). Comparing the rooting responses of newborns following a stimulation to either the right or left cheek, caused by either the finger of an experimenter (allo-stimulation) or the spontaneous transport of the infant’s own hand toward the face (self-stimulation), we observed that newborns tend to turn their head significantly more toward the experimenter’s finger compared to their own hand. When the hand of the experimenter was involved, the newborns showed more head orientation with mouth opening and sucking movements with tongue protrusion.
It appears that infants from birth are capable of discriminating information that specifies their own bodies as differentiated entities. This observation
Philippe Rochat
is not trivial since it is contrary to the long held idea of an initial state of un-differentiation or confusion between infants and their environment (e.g., Piaget 1936). Some psychoanalysts went as far as elaborating theories of personality development on the premise that the starting point of such development is an initial state of un-differentiation or “infantile autism” (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman 1975).
Recent research indicates that, on the contrary, early on, infants process intermodal (polysensory) information that specifies the body as a distinct entity. Researchers have now accumulated numerous data demonstrating the remarkable coordination at birth of visual and postural/vestibular systems. Such coordination allows an infant to pick up information that specifies movements of his/her own body in a stable environment or the reverse, the stability of the body in a moving environment (Butterworth 1995; Bertenthal & Rose 1995; Jouen & Gapenne 1995). Such discrimination, which is based on the processing of perceptual information from multiple modalities, is evident from birth and probably the result of an active prenatal calibration of sensory and motor systems. Fine ultrasonic scanning of fetuses during the last 3 months of pregnancy reveals indeed that most of the behaviors observed immediately after birth in newborns are already functional and well established in the womb (Hopkins & Prechtl 1984; De Vries, Visser, & Prechtl 1984).
There is a remarkable continuity between pre- and post-natal behaviors (Prechtl 1984). This continuity suggests that the implicit knowledge of the body as differentiated entity expressed in newborns’ behavior could well be the product of prenatal learning, as in the case of maternal voice discrimination expressed by newborns immediately after birth (DeCasper & Fifer 1980; DeCasper, Lecanuet, Busnell et al. 1994) or the evidence of neonates’ olfactory discrimination of maternal amniotic fluid compared to the amniotic fluid of a female stranger (Marlier, Schaal, & Soussignan 1998).
The perceptual learning of their own bodies as differentiated from other entities in the world is the main pillar of an ecological sense of self expressed by infants from birth. Although far from a conception of the self as perceived by others, this basic sense of self is a necessary precursor, a sine qua non condition for the emergence of co-awareness. Questions remain, however, as to how infants develop co-awareness from this basic, early (perceived) sense of self.
