Social touch: A new vista for developmental cognitive neuroscience?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The past years have seen a renewed interest in measuring neural, physiological or cognitive, immediate and longer-term effects of human interaction through touch. The term “social touch” was rapidly adopted, implying the existence of (stimulus) selective and (functionally) specific mechanisms. It has been suggested that decreased exposure to social touch during development, either due to its unavailability (e.g. as in the case of pre-term infants placed in incubators or of infants of mothers with post-partum depression) or to atypical touch perception (e.g. as might be the case in autism) has serious consequences for subsequent brain and cognitive development. Despite the excitement surrounding this topic, and its clinical relevance, its object of study remained poorly defined and understood.