The longer the reference, the shorter the legs: How response modality affects body perception
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The longer the reference, the shorter the legs: How response modality affects body perception Giorgia Tosi 1
&
Daniele Romano 1,2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract There is a growing interest in the characterization of the internal body model: a stored representation of the metric properties of the body. Tactile Distance Task (TDT) is an experimental procedure for assessing the body metric, based on the perception of distances between tactile stimuli. We aimed at ruling out potential cognitive confounds: the body part being touched, the response estimation method being used, and the replicability of the results. Crucially, we compared two scoring indices (Global shape index vs. Misestimation of the distance) that have been used in the literature assessing the unique contribution of each score. Our data revealed a distortion of body metric perception of the leg. In particular, we found a more substantial reduction in proximodistal distances rather than in the medio-lateral axis. TDT turned out to be a reliable and replicable method producing consistent results applicable to different body parts. The global shape index was shown to be particularly resistant to contextual experimental factors, while the Misestimation resulted in being affected by the estimation modalities, revealing that the verbal response was the most precise method. Finally, we provided substantial support for the combined use of the two indices as they were shown to give complementary information about body metric representation distortions. Keywords Body metric . Leg representation . Tactile distance perception . Multidimensional scaling . Misestimation
Introduction In the last 10 years, there has been a growing interest in the characterization of the body model of size and shape: a stored representation of the metric properties of the body (Longo & Morcom, 2016; Longo & Haggard, 2010; Tamè, Braun, Holmes, Farnè, & Pavani, 2016; Tsakiris, 2010). One of the most used experimental procedures for assessing body metric is based on the perception of distances between distinct tactile stimuli. The rationale behind this procedure is that, in order to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02074-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Giorgia Tosi [email protected] Daniele Romano [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Building U6, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy
2
NeuroMi - Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy
estimate the distance between two touches applied on the skin, we need to map those touches on a mental representation of the body part being touched, a stored model that retains the metric properties of the body (Longo, Azañón, & Haggard, 2010; Longo, Mancini, & Haggard, 2015; Longo & Haggard, 2011, Longo & Haggard, 2012). The tactile distance perception procedure (Longo & Golubova, 2017) consists of judging the perceived distance between to
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