Completed projects

Bodily signals, such as heartbeat and respiration, are important for the perception of the emotion of other people by providing an information source that is used to distinguish between self and other. However, there are few findings on the development of the perception of bodily signals in infancy and how such a perception is connected and interacts with the development of the understanding of other people’s emotions. In this longitudinal project we investigated the development of bodily signals over the course of the first 18 months of life and their importance for the early understanding of other people’s emotions.

This project was supported by the Austrian Sciene Fund (FWF) – project number 33486-B.

In this project, we investigated the emerging sense of self in infancy by focusing on the role of embodied interactions, e.g., through the sensing of internal bodily signals such as the heartbeat, to understand how a sense of self is constructed. 

This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number KA 4926/1-1.

Our cross-cultural study in collaboration with Kyoto University investigated how early mother-infant interaction shapes culture specific visual perception processes. Images were shown to Japanese and Austrian mother-infant dyads while the infant's brain activity was recorded with electroencephalography. Our findings help to understand the developmental origins of cross-cultural differences in perception and cognition, already emerging at such an early age. 

This project was partially funded by the Mobility Fellowship of Vienna University in a research partnership with Kyoto University in Japan.