Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Caregiver-infant interaction through touch was shown to have long-term effects on child’s cognitive development,but the mechanisms are poorly understood. Our aim is to investigate how affective touch (slow gentle caressing) affects arousalstates in young infants. Previous work showed that slow-touch decreases heart rate in 9-month-old infants.We tested two groups of 6-months-old (n=26) and 9-months-old infants (n=23). We measured heart rate and saccadic reactiontime while infants performed a visual orienting task, where speed of re-orienting from a central fixation to a peripheral targetwas measured. During the experiment, infants received either slow or fast-touch on their back in blocked trials. We found noeffects of touch on heart rate in either age-group, and only marginal effects of slow-touch on reaction times in 9-month-oldinfants. We are currently testing 2 months-old infants to investigate if these effects are observed earlier in life; these new resultswill be discussed.