Exploration Patterns in Spontaneous Self-Touch Actions in Infancy

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68407700%3A21230%2F25%3A00387031" target="_blank" >RIV/68407700:21230/25:00387031 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDL63968.2025.11204454" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDL63968.2025.11204454</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDL63968.2025.11204454" target="_blank" >10.1109/ICDL63968.2025.11204454</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Exploration Patterns in Spontaneous Self-Touch Actions in Infancy

Original language description

Infants frequently touch their own bodies from the earliest months of life, raising questions about whether these self-directed actions reflect active body exploration. We hypothesize that infants’ self-touch actions are not random but rather occur in distinct latent states that differ in exploratory value, with some states yielding higher information gain about body structure and sensorimotor contingencies. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a longitudinal observational study involving four healthy full-term infants (two females, two males) aged between 6 and 37 weeks. Infants were video-recorded in a naturalistic home environment while lying supine, with minimal external distractions. Self-touch actions were manually coded to capture discrete parameters including touch location, duration, and inter-touch intervals. These events were then discretized into a high-dimensional state space and analyzed using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to infer latent behavioural states. The entropy of the emission probability matrices from the HMMs provided a measure of state variability, and information gain was quantified using the Kullback-Leibler divergence between successive probability distributions over touch locations. Our analyses revealed two distinct states differing in emission entropy, with the higher-entropy state associated with significantly greater information gain about the body. These findings suggest that early self-touch may serve as an active learning mechanism, enabling infants to gather crucial information about their own bodies.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

50103 - Cognitive sciences

Project

Result was created during the realization of more than one project. More information in the Projects tab.

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

2025 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL)

ISBN

979-8-3315-4343-3

ISSN

—

e-ISSN

—

Number of pages

8

Pages from-to

—

Publisher name

IEEE Conference Publications

Place of publication

Piscataway

Event location

Praha

Event date

Sep 16, 2025

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

—