ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Human Developmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1603183
This article is part of the Research TopicNeurocardiology: The Science of Heart-Brain InteractionsView all articles
The Influence of Affective Touch on Interoceptive and Exteroceptive Sensory Integration in Infants: Evidence from Heartbeat-Evoked and Event-Related Potentials
Provisionally accepted
- Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The daily accumulation of multimodal interactions with a primary caregiver is thought to integrate interoceptive and exteroceptive information in the infant brain, which may contribute to the development of social cognition. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this integration in infancy remain largely unexplored. Focusing on affective touch as a sensory stimulus affecting infants' interoception during caregiver-infant interactions, this study examined how the perception of affective touch (i.e., stroking) affects the neural processing of interoceptive-exteroceptive integration in infants' brains. During the exposure phase, infants' legs were stroked while viewing a stranger's face (Affective Touch, AT), while another face was presented without touch as a control (No-Affective Touch, No-AT). In the test phase, infants viewed the same faces in isolation. Electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) were simultaneously measured to compare two neural indices between conditions in the test phase: heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), reflecting interoceptive-exteroceptive integration, and event-related potentials (ERPs) to faces, indicating exteroceptive processing. Results showed that affective touch enhanced HEPs in frontal-central regions and modulated ERPs to faces, with stronger P400 amplitudes in parietal regions. In addition, a positive correlation between HEP responses and ERPs to faces emerged, with individual differences in resting HEP, reflecting baseline interoceptive-exteroceptive sensitivity, being associated with HEP modulation during the test phase. These findings suggest the role of multisensory experiences, particularly those involving touch, in enhancing interoceptive-exteroceptive integration, with individual variations. Our findings support the hypothesis that affective caregiver-infant interactions facilitate interoceptive-exteroceptive integration, a fundamental process underlying the development of social cognition, and emotional regulation.
Keywords: affective touch, interoception, exteroception, Heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP), event-related potentials (ERP), Multissensory integration
Received: 31 Mar 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tanaka and Myowa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yukari Tanaka, tanaka.yukari.2z@kyoto-u.ac.jp
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.