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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 18, 2026

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation

Published on: March 1, 2017

Implicit body representations and the conscious body image.

Matthew R Longo¹, Patrick Haggard

¹Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom. m.longo@bbk.ac.uk

Acta Psychologica

|September 12, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Implicit body representations, crucial for somatosensory processing, show significant size and shape distortions. These distortions are also present in metric body image measures, but not depictive ones, suggesting a nuanced relationship.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Psychology
Body Perception

Background:

Somatosensory processing involves implicit body representations with notable size and shape distortions.
The link between these implicit representations and conscious body image is not fully understood.
Previous research in eating disorders shows greater distortions in depictive versus metric body image measures.

Purpose of the Study:

To compare implicit body representations of position sense with conscious body image assessed by depictive and metric methods.
To investigate the dissociation between implicit and explicit body representations.
To determine if distortions in implicit body representations extend to different types of body image measures.

Main Methods:

Assessed implicit body representations through position sense.
Measured conscious body image using a depictive method (template matching) comparing hand images.
Measured conscious body image using a metric method (line length) comparing hand parts to a line.

Main Results:

Confirmed characteristic distortions in implicit body representations for position sense.
Observed attenuated distortions in metric body image measures, but not in depictive measures.
Replicated the dissociation between implicit and explicit body representations, finding it is not absolute.

Conclusions:

The dissociation between implicit and explicit body representations is not absolute.
Specific tasks may integrate implicit and explicit body representations to varying degrees.
Metric body image measures may reflect a combination of visual and somatosensory body representations, rather than pure body image.