Implicit body representations and tactile spatial remapping

Longo, Matthew R.; Mancini, Flavia; Haggard, Patrick

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.07.002

Cited by 62 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Subsequent studies using this paradigm have replicated this basic pattern of results and extended them in several ways (e.g., Ferrè, Vagnoni, & Haggard, 2013;Longo, 2014Longo, , 2015bLongo & Haggard, 2012a, 2012bLongo, Long, & Haggard, 2012;Longo, Mancini, & Haggard, 2015b;Mattioni & Longo, 2014;Saulton, Dodds, Bülthoff, & de la Rosa, 2015). For example, Longo and Haggard (2012a) found that these distortions were smaller in magnitude when participants judged locations on the palmar surface of the hand.…”

Section: Distortions In Position Sensementioning

confidence: 55%

Distorted Body Representations in Healthy Cognition

Longo

2017

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Delusions and misperceptions about the body are a conspicuous feature of numerous neurological and psychiatric conditions. In stark contrast to such pathological cases, the immediacy and familiarity of our ordinary experience of our body can make it seem as if our representation of our body is highly accurate, even infallible. Recent research has begun to demonstrate, however, that large and systematic distortions of body representation are a normal part of healthy cognition. Here, I will describe this research, focusing on distortions of body representations underlying tactile distance perception and position sense. I will also discuss evidence for distortions of higherorder body representations, such as the conscious body image. Finally, I will end with a discussion of the potential relations among different body representations and their distortions. Distortions of Body Representations 3Our body is the core of our sense of self, and central to our personal identity as an individual. We experience our body from the outside, as a physical object in the world like any other, but also from the inside, as an object of immediate experience (Bermúdez, Marcel, & Eilan, 1995). The intimate and direct connection we have with our own body can make knowledge of our body seem immune to the usual sources of perceptual error and illusion. Indeed, the very fact that we have multiple ways of knowing about our body (from inside, and from outside) could very well contribute to making the overall perception of the body highly reliable. While distortions and misperceptions of the body are a familiar result of several psychiatric and neurological conditions, it is natural to suppose that healthy adults have highly accurate -even infallible -knowledge about the physical structure of their bodies. In this paper, I will describe recent research that has begun to question this assumption, showing large and systematic distortions of body representation in healthy adults. After giving a brief summary of the varied distortions of body representation found in pathological conditions, I will describe research showing large distortions of body representations

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Section: Distortions In Position Sensementioning

confidence: 55%

Distorted Body Representations in Healthy Cognition

Longo

2017

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…This allows proprioceptive maps to be constructed even for regions of skin without lexically-labeled landmarks. Indeed, we found that these maps were stretched along the medio-lateral hand axis (Longo et al, 2015b). If a common body model underlies both tactile distance perception and position sense, we expected a correlation across participants in the magnitude of the distortions found for each task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…For example, as discussed above, there are clear biases to overestimate the width of the hand compared to its length, both in tactile distance perception (e.g., Green, 1982; Longo and Haggard, 2011) and in position sense (e.g., Longo and Haggard, 2010). Further, distortions are substantially larger on the hairy skin of the hand dorsum than on the glabrous skin of the palm, both for tactile distance perception (Longo and Haggard, 2011; Le Cornu Knight et al, 2014; Longo et al, 2015a,b) and position sense (Longo and Haggard, 2012a). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We measured anisotropy of tactile distance perception on the dorsum of the left hand using a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) method similar to that we have used previously (Longo and Haggard, 2011; Longo et al, 2015a). Because the method described above for producing proprioceptive maps underlying position sense focuses on the fingers, we used a revised procedure we recently reported (Longo et al, 2015b) which allows mapping the hand dorsum. Specifically, instead of giving participants verbal instructions about which landmark to localize, a point on the hand is touched and participants are asked to localize the touch in external space.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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No Correlation between Distorted Body Representations Underlying Tactile Distance Perception and Position Sense

Longo

Morcom

2016

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Both tactile distance perception and position sense are believed to require that immediate afferent signals be referenced to a stored representation of body size and shape (the body model). For both of these abilities, recent studies have reported that the stored body representations involved are highly distorted, at least in the case of the hand, with the hand dorsum represented as wider and squatter than it actually is. Here, we investigated whether individual differences in the magnitude of these distortions are shared between tactile distance perception and position sense, as would be predicted by the hypothesis that a single distorted body model underlies both tasks. We used established tasks to measure distortions of the represented shape of the hand dorsum. Consistent with previous results, in both cases there were clear biases to overestimate distances oriented along the medio-lateral axis of the hand compared to the proximo-distal axis. Moreover, within each task there were clear split-half correlations, demonstrating that both tasks show consistent individual differences. Critically, however, there was no correlation between the magnitudes of distortion in the two tasks. This casts doubt on the proposal that a common body model underlies both tactile distance perception and position sense.

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“…Semantically, fingers often constitute a separate body part category (Enfield, Majid, & Van Staden, 2006). Hence, memory biases related to finger categorization could explain why underestimation of finger length compared to hand width were found in localization tasks (Longo, Mancini, & Haggard, 2015;Mattioni & Longo, 2014). To assess whether memory of distances between landmarks can create the distortions measured on items in the localization task, we ran a second experiment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of visual similarity and memory in body model distortions

et al. 2016

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Several studies have shown that the perception of one's own hand size is distorted in proprioceptive localization tasks. It has been suggested that those distortions mirror somatosensory anisotropies. Recent research suggests that non-corporeal items also show some spatial distortions. In order to investigate the psychological processes underlying the localization task, we investigated the influences of visual similarity and memory on distortions observed on corporeal and non-corporeal items. In experiment 1, participants indicated the location of landmarks on: their own hand, a rubber hand (rated as most similar to the real hand), and a rake (rated as least similar to the real hand). Results show no significant differences between rake and rubber hand distortions but both items were significantly less distorted than the hand. Experiment 2 and 3 explored the role of memory in spatial distance judgments of the hand, the rake and the rubber hand. Spatial representations of items measured in experiment 2 and 3 were also distorted but showed the tendency to be smaller than in localization tasks. While memory and visual similarity seem to contribute to explain qualitative similarities in distortions between the hand and non-corporeal items, those factors cannot explain the larger magnitude observed in hand distortions.

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Implicit body representations and tactile spatial remapping

Cited by 62 publications

References 42 publications

Distorted Body Representations in Healthy Cognition

Distorted Body Representations in Healthy Cognition

No Correlation between Distorted Body Representations Underlying Tactile Distance Perception and Position Sense

The role of visual similarity and memory in body model distortions

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