Evidence for Multiple, Distinct Representations of the Human Body

Abstract

Abstract& Previous data from single-case and small group studies have suggested distinctions among structural, conceptual, and online sensorimotor representations of the human body. We developed a battery of tasks to further examine the prevalence and anatomic substrates of these body representations. The battery was administered to 70 stroke patients. Fifty-one percent of the patients were impaired relative to controls on at least one body representation measure. Further, principal components analysis of the patient data as well as direct comparisons of patient and control performance suggested a triple dissociation between measures of the 3 putative body representations. Consistent with previous distinctions between the ''what'' and ''how'' pathways, lesions of the left temporal lobe were most consistently associated with impaired performance on tasks assessing knowledge of the shape or lexical-semantic information about the body, whereas lesions of the dorsolateral frontal and parietal regions resulted in impaired performance on tasks requiring on-line coding of body posture. &

More than skin deep: Body representation beyond primary somatosensory cortex

“…For example, Benedet and Goodglass (1989) found no relation between two measures of body topology (figure drawing and placement of parts in relation to a face) and two auditory measures of body part comprehension. Similarly, Schwoebel and Coslett (2005), in a principal components analysis of a number of tasks given to stroke patients, found distinct latent variables reflecting performance on tasks requiring lexicalsemantic knowledge vs. knowledge of the location or configuration of body parts. The most dramatic deficit in structural knowledge of the body is seen in the condition of autotopagnosia (not to be confused with atopognosia, the inability to localise touch on the skin surface, described above).…”

“…Such findings suggest a selective impairment of a structural representation of the topological relations among body parts, preserving semantic knowledge about the functions of parts and their cultural associations. Coslett and colleagues (e.g., Buxbaum & Coslett, 2001;Schwoebel & Coslett, 2005) have referred to this representation as the body structural description.…”

Bodily ownership and self-location: Components of bodily self-consciousness

“…In addition, the consequences of PPc lesions strongly suggest that the PPc is a crucial brain structure for combining several reference frames (see Berlucchi & Aglioti, 2010 for a review). Patients with PPc lesions are strongly impaired when performing tasks requiring on-line coding of body posture (Schwoebel & Coslett, 2005), when attending to body parts on the left in the case of a right lesion (i.e. personal neglect; Committeri et al, 2007) and when describing the spatial relations between body parts in the case of a left lesion (i.e.…”

Embodiment, ownership and disownership

“…The body image is often conceived as a long-term body representation (e.g., body structural description, cf. Schwoebel & Coslett, 2005), whereas it is classically assumed that the body schema is a highly dynamic body representation, built up at time t, stored in working memory, and erased at time t + 1 by the next one. However, this view is misleading.…”