Does the body image exist in three dimensions? The study of visual mental representation of a body and a nonbody...

Do the mental images of 3-dimensional objects recreate the depth characteristics of the original objects? This investigation of the characteristics of mental images utilized a novel boundary-detection task that required participants to relate a pair of crosses to the boundary of an image mentally projected onto a computer screen. 48 female participants with body attitudes within expected normal range were asked to image their own body and a familiar object from the front and the side. When the visual mental image was derived purely from long-term memory, accuracy was better than chance for the front (64%) and side (63%) of the body and also for the front (55%) and side (68%) of the familiar nonbody object. This suggests that mental images containing depth and spatial information may be generated from information held in long-term memory. Pictorial exposure to views of the front or side of the objects was used to investigate the representations from which this 3-dimensional shape and size information is derived. The results are discussed in terms of three possible representational formats and argue that a front-view 2 1/2-dimensional representation mediates the transfer of information from long-term memory when depth information about the body is required.