This is me: kinematic analysis of neonatal spontaneous movements reveals the propensity to explore the self-body

Previous influential accounts have hypothesized that early self-directed movements may play a fundamental role in the formation of a bodily-self representation. By contacting the body, newborns may experience the unique intermodal perception between proprioception and touch which only pertains to their own body. Although this behaviour has been anecdotally observed in foetuses, it remains partially unexplored in early postnatal life. Here, we aim to provide quantitative evidence of the newborns' propensity to engage in self-directed movements. We extracted hand-related kinematics from videos recorded in fourteen newborns (12-57 hour-old), in the ecological setting of General Movements' clinical evaluation. Our results show that newborns engage significantly more in self- than outer-directed movements. Furthermore, self-directed movements often culminate in a body contact (i.e., self-touch), and the trunk is the most frequently targeted body area. We discuss these findings by endorsing self-directed behaviour as a crucial context fostering the emergence of an early bodily-self representation in typical development. In addition, the manually scored dataset presented here is currently being used as a reference for the development of automatic algorithms, which will allow classifying neonatal movements of a larger dataset acquired in these highly ecological conditions (i.e., a simple video recording). Such an innovative tool could help develop kinematic markers of typical development, thus laying the groundwork for investigating its possible alteration in atypical development.