The ability to sense and use the body parts in an organized and differentiated manner is a precursor of body knowledge in infancy. To acquire this ability, the infant's brain might explore the perceptual consequences of its bodily actions. Undifferentiated body movements would gradually be replaced by more precise actions. Only a very few studies have tested this ‘global‐to‐local’ hypothesis, and none of them have so far been replicated. In this study, we assessed arm differentiation in 4‐, 6‐, and 8‐month‐old infants using a new contingency detection task in which infants have to detect a contingency between one of their arms’ activity and an audiovisual stimulus on a screen. We found that 4‐ to 8‐month‐old infants seem to be able to use their arms in a differentiated manner. However, surprisingly, we were not able to show a developmental trend in arm differentiation between 4 and 8 months of age.

中文翻译：

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通过婴儿手臂的分化来衡量身体知识的发展：从全球到本地？

以有组织和有区别的方式感知和使用身体部位的能力是婴儿期身体知识的先驱。为了获得这种能力，婴儿的大脑可能会探索其身体动作的感知结果。未分化的身体动作将逐渐被更精确的动作所取代。只有极少数的研究检验了这种“全球-局部”假说，到目前为止，没有一个被重复。在这项研究中，我们使用一项新的偶然性检测任务评估了4、6和8个月大婴儿的手臂分化，其中婴儿必须在屏幕上检测其手臂活动之一和视听刺激之间的偶然性。我们发现4到8个月大的婴儿似乎能够以不同的方式使用他们的手臂。但是，令人惊讶的是