Anatomical configuration guides perceptual representation of hands in early infancy

Hands are one of the most socially meaningful components of the human body, allowing us to perform actions and gestures, and express emotions and intentions since very early in life. Evidence shows that infants’ visual and haptic experience is rich with their own’s and others’ hands (Fausey et al., 2016; Aslin, 2009): during their first months of life, infants learn to interact with objects and communicate with people by using and attending to hands (Deák at al., 2014). Recently, it has been shown that infants are sensitive to the shape and structure of hands, preferring scrambled over intact hands (Jubran et al., 2019). However, in the study of Jubran and colleagues (2019), images of scrambled hands were created by altering the location of one or more fingers (e.g., the pinky repositioned between the thumb and the index finger), thus breaking the overall gestalt. Here, we explore whether infants’ representation of hands is guided by anatomical coherence when the overall gestalt is maintained, but the anatomical plausibility is disrupted (i.e., anatomically implausible but configurally recognizable hands). Six-month-old infants were presented with intact and scrambled hands, in which all fingers were switched among one another to anatomically inconsistent positions, but still preserving the overall hand configuration. Infants’ looking times to right and left hands, presented in dorsal or palm view, was recorded using an eye-tracker within a preferential-looking task where intact and scrambled hands were simultaneously presented. Preliminary results reveal that both hand view (palm vs. dorsal) and laterality (right vs. left hand) modulate infants’ preference for scrambled over intact hands (p = .03). Our findings shed light on the specificity of visual information underlying infants’ sensitivity to hands, advancing our understanding of the mechanisms driving perceptual representation and social tuning towards hands.