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EXPLORATION OF CGNFLICTING VISUAL AND PROPRIOCEPTWE INFORMATION

BY 3- TO 5-MONTH-OLD INFANTS

Rachel Morgan and Philippe Rochat

Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322

Recent research demonstrated that self-produced leg movements are perceived within a

calibrated visual-proprioceptive space from as early as 3-months of age (Rochat & Morgan, 1995). Using a paradigm similar to the one used in this previous research, a new study was conducted to

investigate young infants’ ability to localize and explore conflicting visual and proprioceptive information. The empirical question was whether infants will show different patterns of looking and/or overall amount of leg activity depending on the presence or absence of a conflict between these modalities. Fifteen 3- to 5-month-old infants were successively presented with an on-line video image of their own legs filmed from the waist down by two cameras located directly behind and above their heads. On one display (the Normal condition), a video composite of their own legs was displayed, such that infants viewed their own legs in their normal relative position. In another

condition (the Composite condition), the right leg was displayed on both sides of the TV screen. On the right side of the display, an image of the leg was presented in its appropriate spatial location

and configuration in space. On the other side of the monitor, the right leg was projected on the left side of the display, reversed from right to left providing a seemingly correct composite image of the legs from the waist down, yet consisting of two different images of the right leg moving in

mirror synchrony. Infants experienced the different conditions for two minutes each in a

counterbalanced order. An analysis of the infants’ looking time at the display revealed that overall, infants look equally at the TV in the Normal condition compared to the Composite condition. However, post hoc comparisons revealed that in the Composite condition, infants spent a greater percentage of time gazing at the visually incongruent side of the display (the left side). In contrast, in the Normal condition, an opposite trend was observed. No differences were found regarding the

overall amount of leg activity performed by infants while viewing either display. These results

indicate that infants are sensitive to the correspondence between proprioceptive and visual

information specifying self-produced leg movements. Furthermore, they reveal that when them is a

lack of correspondence between felt and seen leg movement, infants tend to actively explore this

conflict by orienting their visual attention towards its location on the display. The results are interpreted as the early expression of a body schema that is perceptually based and that corresponds to a precocious intermodal calibration of the body.