Commentary on Part I - The embodied mini-me

Summary

We are certainly born with a body, but are we also born with a body in our brain? The four chapters that deal with the development of body representations in the present volume touch upon a timely issue in developmental psychology, cognitive and experimental psychology, and cognitive neurosciences. Back in the old days of the cognitive revolution, multisensory processing and sensorimotor integration were placed on the margins of psychological research on the human mind, mainly because the psychological community thought that whatever interesting goes on in our minds has little or nothing to do with the organs that we use to perceive the world and move around it. However, recent interdisciplinary advances suggest that higher cognitive functions are indeed grounded in basic sensorimotor processes (Barsalou, 2008; Rossetti et al., 2007). Embodied cognition accounts emphasize the crucial role of body representations for every act of perception, but even for other cognitive functions such as reasoning and mentalizing. Even psychological models of the self tend to ground the most basic sense of self to its body, rather than to autobiographical memories and cognitive schemata that was the trend for much of the research on self done during the “cognitive revolution.” The four chapters presented here deal with a series of topics ranging from basic processes of sensorimotor integration during visual perception (see DeLoache and Uttal, Chapter 4 of this volume) to the organization of body-schematic and multisensory processes (see Chapter 1 by Rochat and Chapter 2 by Zwicker, Moore, and Povinelli), and from the awareness of one’s body image (see Chapter 3 by Brownell, Svetlova, and Nichols) to self-identity (see Chapter 2 by Zwicker, Moore, and Povinelli).

The body in the wonderland

DeLoache and Uttal focus on the striking scale errors performed by some infants when confronted with miniature replicas of larger-sized toys. For example, some infants would try to get into a miniature car, if they had previously played with a larger car. DeLoache and Uttal make an interesting claim about the development of the synergies between the ventral and dorsal streams that are required for efficient object recognition and manipulation. This hypothesis seems plausible given our knowledge on the behavior of neuropsychological patients. However, while reading this chapter, the reader inevitably wonders what would happen if we were to reverse the order of presentation of the two critical conditions. Typically, infants are first invited to play with small chairs and cars whose size affords real-life type of interactions (e.g. sitting on the baby chair, or getting into the small car). They are then asked to leave the room, and when they return, their toys have been replaced by miniatures that are almost identical in appearance. A certain percentage of infants would then perform the typical scale errors by trying to sit on a chair or get into a car that is now as small as their foot. Would infants make the same scale errors if they were not exposed to the larger toys in the first place? Apparently, only anecdotal evidence exists that infants do make scale errors spontaneously (e.g. trying to sit on the doll’s chair), but one could not rule out the role of priming effects in the standard experimental paradigm or the existence of a highly malleable representation of their body size that has not yet matured to the level needed for constraining motivational states (e.g. “I want to play with this toy”) and informing efficient interaction with all the environmental challenges. A strong motivation to explore whatever there is out there that attracts their attention and interest, in combination with the absence of stable representations of body size or awareness of their body competence, may result in spontaneous unsuccessful interactions with the external world. After all, it is by trial and error that we get to learn, not only about the world, but also about ourselves. Scale errors are just another instance of this process arising when interacting in the wonderland.