Babies as young as four months show signs of self-awareness

Babies as young as four months old can make sense of how their bodies interact with the space around them, according to new research from the University of Birmingham.

The findings, published today (21 November 2023) in Scientific Reports, shed new light on how self-awareness develops.

Experts from the Birmingham BabyLab showed babies a ball on a screen moving towards or away from them.

When the ball was closest to them on the screen, the babies were presented with a 'touch' (a small vibration) on their hands, whilst their brain activity was being measured.

The data collection for the study was conducted at Goldsmiths (University of London).

The researchers found that from just four months old, babies show enhanced somatosensory (tactile) brain activity when a touch is preceded by an object moving towards them.

Dr Giulia Orioli, Research Fellow in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, who led the study said: "Our findings indicate that even in the first few months of life, before babies have even learned to reach for objects, the multisensory brain is wired up to make links between what babies see and what they feel. This means they can sense the space around them and understand how their bodies interact with that space. This is sometimes referred to as peripersonal space.

"Of course, humans do this all the time as adults, using our combined senses to perceive where we are in space and making predictions about when we will touch an object or not. But now that we know that babies in the early stages of their development begin to show signs of this, it opens up questions about how much of these abilities are learnt, or innate."

The researchers also explored how an unexpected 'touch' would affect some of the older babies in the study.

They found that in babies aged eight months old when the touch on their hand was preceded by the ball on the screen moving away from them, the babies' brain activity showed signs that they were surprised.

Andrew Bremner, Professor of Developmental Psychology, commented: "Seeing the older babies show surprise responses suggests that they had not expected the touch due to the visual direction the object was moving in. This indicates that as babies proceed through their first year of life, their brains construct a more sophisticated awareness of how their body exists in the space around them."

Next, the researchers are hoping to follow up this study with younger and older participants.

Research with adults can illuminate the kinds of brain activity which infants are developing towards.

They are also hoping to be able to see if there are early signs of these "multisensory" abilities in newborn babies.

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Mild fever helps clear infections faster, new study suggests

It may be better to let a mild fever run its course instead of automatically reaching for medication, new University of Alberta research suggests.

Researchers found that untreated moderate fever helped fish clear their bodies of infection rapidly, controlled inflammation and repaired damaged tissue. "We let nature do what nature does, and in this case it was very much a positive thing," says immunologist Daniel Barreda, lead author on the study and a joint professor in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences and the Faculty of Science.

Moderate fever is self-resolving, meaning that the body can both induce it and shut it down naturally without medication, Barreda explains. The health advantages of natural fever to humans still have to be confirmed through research, but the researchers say because the mechanisms driving and sustaining fever are shared among animals, it is reasonable to expect similar benefits are going to happen in humans.

That suggests we should resist reaching for over-the-counter fever medications, also known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, at the first signs of a mild temperature, he says. "They take away the discomfort felt with fever, but you're also likely giving away some of the benefits of this natural response."

The study helps shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the benefits of moderate fever, which Barreda notes has been evolutionarily conserved across the animal kingdom for 550 million years. "Every animal examined has this biological response to infection."

For the study, fish were given a bacterial infection and their behaviour was then tracked and evaluated using machine learning. Outward symptoms were similar to those seen in humans with fever, including immobility, fatigue and malaise. These were then matched to important immune mechanisms inside the animals.

The research showed that natural fever offers an integrative response that not only activates defences against infection, but also helps control it.The researchers found that fever helped to clear the fish of infection in about seven days -- half the time it took for those animals not allowed to exert fever. Fever also helped to shut down inflammation and repair injured tissue.

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Researchers solve a 150-year-old mystery: Aetosaur find involves juveniles

Aetosaurs had a small head and a crocodile-like body. The land dwellers were up to six meters long and widely distributed geographically. They died out about 204 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic. In Kaltental near Stuttgart, Germany, an assemblage of 24 Aetosaurus ferratus individuals, only between 20 and 82 centimeters long, was discovered in 1877. Since then, scientists have been puzzling over whether they were juveniles or small adults. A team led by Elżbieta M. Teschner from the University of Bonn has now solved the mystery: Bone examination of two specimens shows that they are juveniles. The results have now been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Reptiles of the genus Aetosaurus ferratus were discovered in a quarry near Kaltental, now a district of Stuttgart, and were first described nearly 150 years ago. The assemblage of about 24 individuals was dated to be about 215 million years old. "What was striking was that the total body length was only between 20 and 82 centimeters," says Elżbieta M. Teschner, who is pursuing a doctorate in paleontology at the University of Bonn while also conducting research at the University of Opole (Poland). "Interestingly, they were also the only fossils found in the area," she adds.

Oscar Fraas provided the first description of the skeletons in 1877 and suggested that they had washed up together. Sixteen years ago, Rainer R. Schoch of the State Natural History Museum in Stuttgart published a more detailed morphological study. Based on features visible to the naked eye, he determined that they must be juveniles. Together with Julia B. Desojo, an Argentine paleontologist from CONICET at the Museo de La Plata, they later described the skull of a larger skeleton of another aetosaur species (Paratypothorax andressorum). The find, more than 50 kilometers from Kaltental, could potentially be the adult form of the small aetosaur species known from the assemblage, they surmised.

Paleohistology enables age determination

The assumption only recently became certainty: With the help of the science of tissue growth (paleohistology) it has now become possible to examine the bones of the Kaltental find. "Long bones are a good model for calculating the age of animals because they deposit growth rings during their life that can be counted -- similar to the growth rings in tree trunks," says Dorota Konietzko-Meier, paleontologist from the University of Bonn. Based on this method, the relative individual age of the studied specimens could be determined.

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