Romano Daniele, Marini Francesco, Maravita Angelo
University of Milano Bicocca, Department of Psychology, piazza Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy; NeuroMi - Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy.
University of Milano Bicocca, Department of Psychology, piazza Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy; Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, USA.
Cognition. 2017 Aug;165:105-112. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.014. Epub 2017 May 19.
The representation of the body in the brain is constantly updated to allow optimal sensorimotor interactions with the external world. In addition to dynamic features, body representation holds stable features that are still largely unknown. In the present work we explored the hypothesis that body parts have preferential associations with relative spatial locations. Specifically, in three experiments, we found consistent preferential associations between the index finger and the top position, and between the thumb and the bottom position. This association was found in a tactile sensory discrimination task, which was conducted both with and without vision, as well as at the implicit conceptual association level. These findings show that body parts and spatial locations are stably associated. Therefore, not only are body segments dynamically mapped in space for perception and action, but they also hold intrinsic spatial information that contributes to somatosensory spatial processing.
大脑中身体的表征会不断更新，以实现与外部世界的最佳感觉运动交互。除了动态特征外，身体表征还具有一些稳定特征，而这些特征在很大程度上仍不为人知。在本研究中，我们探讨了身体部位与相对空间位置存在优先关联的假设。具体而言，在三个实验中，我们发现食指与顶部位置、拇指与底部位置之间存在一致的优先关联。这种关联在触觉感官辨别任务中被发现，该任务在有视觉和无视觉的情况下均进行，并且在隐性概念关联层面也存在。这些发现表明身体部位和空间位置存在稳定关联。因此，身体节段不仅在空间中动态映射以进行感知和行动，而且还拥有有助于体感空间处理的内在空间信息。
