Coochie who? Babies don’t know it’s you tickling them

WHEN your baby giggles as you tickle their toes, it’s natural to think you are bonding with your little one.

But it seems that your child may have no idea that it was you that made them laugh.

Research shows that while they know they have been tickled, very young infants do not know where the touch has come from.

It is only as they reach about six months old that they learn to perceive their body and the space around it.

UK researchers tested four and six-monthold babies to see how the perception of touch changes. The infants had buzzers that emitted a gentle tickle strapped to their feet. The buzzers were activated when their legs were crossed and uncrossed and the researchers noted which foot was wiggled.

When the babies’ legs were uncrossed, both groups did well at wiggling the toes that had been tickled. But when their legs were crossed, the six-month-olds wiggled the foot that had been tickled by the buzzer just 50 per cent of the time – a result no better than chance. In contrast, the four-month- olds moved the correct foot 70 per cent of the time, the journal Current Biology reports.

While this might seem counter-intuitive, the researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London, say the poorer performance of the older babies is actually a sign of a more mature brain – and adults get similarly muddled up.

This is because when our body is touched, we think about where the touch came from, and if our arms are folded, the brain can get confused. So, if the right hand is tickled when the arms are crossed, an adult may think it was actually their left hand that was touched, because they perceived the sensation on the left side of their body.

The fact the younger babies didn’t make this mistake actually showed their brains were doing a more basic calculation.

Researcher Andrew Bremner, a professor of psychology, said: ‘The absence of these mistakes suggests to us that the younger babies are succeeding at the task because they are doing it in a more simple way.

‘They are just responding to the touch on the body, they don’t care where it is in space, they don’t really know where it is coming from.’