Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two studies investigated the existence and properties of the body schema, people's mental representation of the space of their bodies. Participants verified whether a named and a depicted body part were the same or different either when presented a picture of a whole body or when presented the body part alone. Part significance accounted for verification times better than part size or part discontinuity, suggesting that mental representations of the body reflect proprioceptive as well as visual knowledge.