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  • 9 - The Development of Touch Perception and Body Representation

  • from Part II - Perceptual Development
  • Edited by Jeffrey J. Lockman, Tulane University, Louisiana, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, New York University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development
    Published online:
    26 September 2020
    Print publication:
    13 August 2020, pp 238-262

  • Summary

    Touch occupies a greater extent of our bodies than all other senses put together (see Gallace & Spence, 2014, for a rich characterization of touch). The skin, our organ of cutaneous touch, is thought to account for 16–18% of body mass (Montagu, 1978). As such, touch can certainly be considered the bodily sense, being distributed not just in our haptic organs (typically our hands; see Radman, 2013), but throughout and covering our bodies. Partly as a result of this, touch is pervasive in sensory experience. It is also our first sense: At 7 weeks of gestation, a human fetus will move if its lips are touched (Hooker, 1952).