[Source: Science Daily]

The ability to differentiate your own body from others is a fundamental skill, critical for humans’ ability to interact with their environments and the people in them. Now, researchers reporting inCurrent Biology, a Cell Press publication, on November 21 provide some of the first evidence that newborn babies enter the world with the essential mechanisms for this kind of body awareness already in place.
In addition to this insight into normal human development, the researchers stress the importance of the new findings for understanding atypical development, too.
“The identification of these mechanisms at birth in the current study sheds light on the typical trajectory of body awareness across development,” says Maria Laura Filippetti of Birkbeck College, University of London. “Our findings may also be relevant to the investigation of early predictors of developmental disorders in infants, such as autism, where an impairment in the discrimination of self/other is believed to be present.”
Read the Rest of this Article on Science Daily