Extension of perceived arm length following tool-use: Clues to plasticity of body metrics

Sposito, A; Bolognini, Nadia; Vallar, Giuseppe; Maravita, Angelo

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.05.022

Cited by 125 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Similarly, Sposito and colleagues (2012), using a line-bisection task, asked participants to estimate the middle point of their forearm before and after a training using a 60 cm tool. After the training, participants estimated the point to be more distal, which the authors interpreted as evidence of an increase in the perceived length of the arm (Sposito, Bolognini, Vallar, & Maravita, 2012). Overall, these results suggest that these distortions reflect representations of the body itself, rather than specific response attitudes that participants decide to adopt or that are unintentionally generated by the experimenter.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Distorted body representations are robust to differences in experimental instructions

Tamè

Bumpus

Linkenauger

et al. 2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Several recent reports have shown that even healthy adults maintain highly distorted representations of the size and shape of their body. These distortions have been shown to be highly consistent across different study designs and dependent measures. However, previous studies have found that visual judgments of size can be modulated by the experimental instructions used, for example, by asking for judgments of the participant's subjective experience of stimulus size (i.e., apparent instructions) versus judgments of actual stimulus properties (i.e., objective instructions).Previous studies investigating internal body representations have relied exclusively on 'apparent' instructions. Here, we investigated whether apparent versus objective instructions modulate findings of distorted body representations underlying position sense (Exp. 1), tactile distance perception (Exp. 2), as well as the conscious body image (Exp. 3). Our results replicate the characteristic distortions previously reported for each of these tasks and further show that these distortions are not affected by instruction type (i.e., apparent vs. objective). These results show that the distortions measured with these paradigms are robust to differences in instructions and do not reflect a dissociation between perception and belief.3

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Distorted body representations are robust to differences in experimental instructions

Tamè

Bumpus

Linkenauger

et al. 2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…This can possibly be understood in terms of the changed body representation when using a tool (cf. e.g., Canzonieri et al, 2013;Cardinali et al, 2009;Sposito, Bolognini, Vallar, & Maravita, 2012). That is, mutual biases between vision and proprioception may inform here that the internal representation of the body was changed by the acquisition of the kinematic transformation of the tool.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Spatial action-effect binding

Kirsch

Pfister

Kunde

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The temporal interval between an action and its ensuing effect is perceptually compressed. Specifically, the perceived onset of actions is shifted towards their effects in time and, vice versa, the perceived onset of effects is shifted towards their causing actions. In four experiments, we report evidence showing that action-effect binding also occurs in the spatial domain. Participants controlled the location of a visual stimulus by performing stylus movements before they judged either the position of the stylus or the position of the visual stimulus. The results yielded spatial binding between the perceived stylus position and the perceived stimulus position when the stimulus was under full control of the hand movement compared to control conditions without direct control.

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“…For example, in addition to shape, the tools also differed in size, which can modulate the magnitude of plasticity (Farnè et al, 2005;Sposito et al, 2012). In all of our experiments, the goals of the two tools were identical (i.e., picking up and moving balloons).…”

Section: Representational Plasticity and Tool Morphologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…How can tool use lead to an apparent lengthening of the arm representation (Cardinali et al, 2011;Cardinali, Frassinetti, et al, 2009;Sposito et al, 2012) and compression in tactile size perception? There is no conflict if the inverse view is correct.…”

Section: The Relationship Between Plasticity and Represented Shapementioning

confidence: 99%

Tool morphology constrains the effects of tool use on body representations.

Miller¹,

Longo

Saygın

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

105

183

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What factors constrain whether tool use modulates the user's body representations? To date, studies on representational plasticity following tool use have primarily focused on the act of using the tool. Here, we investigated whether the tool's morphology also serves to constrain plasticity. In 2 experiments, we varied whether the tool was morphologically similar to a target body part (Experiment 1, hand; Experiment 2, arm). Participants judged the tactile distance between pairs of points applied to their tool-using target body surface and forehead (control surface) before and after tool use. We applied touch in 2 orientations, allowing us to quantify how tool use modulates the representation's shape. Significant representational plasticity in hand shape (increase in width, decrease in length) was found when the tool was morphologically similar to a hand (Experiment 1A), but not when the tool was arm-shaped (Experiment 1B). Conversely, significant representational plasticity was found on the arm when the tool was arm-shaped (Experiment 2B), but not when hand-shaped (Experiment 2A). Taken together, our results indicate that morphological similarity between the tool and the effector constrains tool-induced representational plasticity. The embodiment of tools may thus depend on a match-to-template process between tool morphology and representation of the body.

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Extension of perceived arm length following tool-use: Clues to plasticity of body metrics

Cited by 125 publications

References 48 publications

Distorted body representations are robust to differences in experimental instructions

Distorted body representations are robust to differences in experimental instructions

Spatial action-effect binding

Tool morphology constrains the effects of tool use on body representations.

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