Action body representations: more pronounced effect of hands than the whole body at a more explicit level of awareness

Abstract

When moving our physical body, we use our mental body representation to guide action planning and execution. Not much is known about the differences in these representations across body districts. We compared implicit and more explicit motor imagery for hands, feet and whole-body representations. Sixty participants (age M = 26.68, SD = 8.22), took part in an online experiment including Implicit Association Tests (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998), as a more implicit task, and a Mental Motor Chronometry (MMC), as a more explicit task (Brusa et al., 2021). The influence of visual imagery was controlled by administering a Vividness of Visual Imagery (VVI) questionnaire. The results show that when the task requires less awareness to be solved, in other words, it is more implicit, there are no differences between hands, feet and whole body. While differences can be found when more awareness of our own body representation and related processes is required, with a stronger motor imagery for the hands than the whole body. This finding is not due to visual imagery differences, as demonstrated by the results of the visual imagery questionnaire. Our findings suggest that hands were stronger than the whole body in the body in action representations.