The Visual and Haptic Contributions to Hand and Foot Representation
摘要
Research has shown systematic distortions in hand representation. It has been argued that these distortions reflect the somatosensory homunculus, and it is through vision that the distortions are corrected. However, in those previous studies the haptic and visual tasks used were considerably different from one another. Therefore, in the current study, we devised a task that had identical requirements for each sensory condition. To be specific, the participants haptically and visually deciphered if various sized gloves and shoes were bigger than their hands and feet. We found that participants overestimated their hand size significantly more in the haptic condition, while the feet were estimated similarly between conditions. Moreover, hand distortions in the haptic condition were significantly larger than feet distortions. Lastly, we also found sex differences, as females overestimated both hand and feet size significantly more than males. Taken together, our results support the suggestion that distortions in haptic body representation tasks are more somatotopic.