de Haan A M, Smit M, Van der Stigchel S, Keyner S A, Dijkerman H C
Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2018 Nov;175:48-66. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.05.002. Epub 2018 Jul 9.
Both making perceptual judgments about your own body and successfully moving your body through the world depend on a mental representation of the body. However, there are indications that moving might be challenging when your body is changing. For instance, the pubertal growth spurt has been reported to be negatively correlated to motor competence. A possible explanation for this clumsiness would be that when the body is growing fast, updating the body representation may lag behind, resulting in a mismatch between internal body representation and actual body size. The current study investigated this hypothesis by testing participants ranging from aged 6 to 50 years on both a tactile body image task and a motor body schema task. Separate groups of participants, including those in the age range when pubertal growth spurt occurs, were asked to estimate the distance between two simultaneously applied tactile stimuli on the arm and to move their hand through apertures of different widths. Tactile distance estimations were equal between participants before, during, and after the age range where the pubertal growth spurt is expected. Similarly, Bayesian evaluation of informative hypotheses showed that participants in the age range of the growth spurt did not move through the apertures as if their representation of the hand was smaller than its physical size. These results suggest that body representations do not lag behind in updating for the pubertal growth spurt.
对自己身体做出感知判断以及在现实世界中成功移动身体都依赖于对身体的心理表征。然而，有迹象表明，当身体发生变化时，移动可能会具有挑战性。例如，据报道青春期生长突增与运动能力呈负相关。这种笨拙表现的一种可能解释是，当身体快速生长时，身体表征的更新可能会滞后，导致内部身体表征与实际身体大小不匹配。当前的研究通过对6至50岁的参与者进行触觉身体意象任务和运动身体图式任务测试来探究这一假设。不同组别的参与者，包括处于青春期生长突增年龄范围的那些人，被要求估计同时施加在手臂上的两个触觉刺激之间的距离，并让他们的手穿过不同宽度的孔。在预期青春期生长突增的年龄范围之前、期间和之后，参与者之间的触觉距离估计是相等的。同样，对信息性假设的贝叶斯评估表明，处于生长突增年龄范围的参与者穿过孔的方式，并不像是他们对手的表征小于其实际大小。这些结果表明，身体表征在青春期生长突增时的更新不会滞后。
