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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 7, 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

Distorted body representations are robust to differences in experimental instructions.

Luigi Tamè¹, Nicola Bumpus², Sally A Linkenauger³

¹Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, WC1E 7HX, London, UK. luigi.tame@gmail.com.

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics

|February 17, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Healthy adults have distorted body size and shape representations. These body distortions are consistent and unaffected by whether participants judge subjective experience (apparent) or actual properties (objective).

Keywords:

Body parts Distortions body representations Instructions judgment size

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Last Updated: Mar 7, 2026

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Published on: October 28, 2020

Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Body Perception Research
Psychophysics

Background:

Recent studies reveal consistent body size and shape distortions in healthy adults.
Previous research suggests visual judgments can be influenced by experimental instructions (apparent vs. objective).
Prior investigations of internal body representations exclusively used apparent instructions.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if instruction type (apparent vs. objective) affects distorted body representations.
To examine the impact of instructions on position sense, tactile distance perception, and conscious body image.
To assess the robustness of body distortion findings across different instruction paradigms.

Main Methods:

Experiment 1: Assessed position sense under apparent and objective instructions.
Experiment 2: Evaluated tactile distance perception with varying instructions.
Experiment 3: Investigated conscious body image using both instruction types.

Main Results:

Characteristic body distortions were replicated across all tested tasks.
Distortions in body representation remained consistent regardless of instruction type (apparent vs. objective).
Findings were robust, indicating distortions are not solely due to subjective experience or belief.

Conclusions:

Body representation distortions are not modulated by apparent versus objective instructions.
The measured distortions are reliable and not a result of the dissociation between perception and belief.
This research confirms the stability of body schema distortions irrespective of experimental framing.