Cocchini Gianna, Galligan Toni, Mora Laura, Kuhn Gustav
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Nov;71(11):2314-2324. doi: 10.1177/1747021817741606. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
Internal spatial body configurations are crucial to successfully interact with the environment and to experience our body as a three-dimensional volumetric entity. These representations are highly malleable and are modulated by a multitude of afferent and motor information. Despite some studies reporting the impact of sensory and motor modulation on body representations, the long-term relationship between sensory information and mental representation of own body parts is still unclear. We investigated hand representation in a group of expert sleight-of-hand magicians and in a group of age-matched adults naïve to magic (controls). Participants were asked to localise landmarks of their fingers when their hand position was congruent with the mental representation (Experiment 1) and when proprioceptive information was "misleading" (Experiment 2). Magicians outperformed controls in both experiments, suggesting that extensive training in sleight of hand has a profound effect in refining hand representation. Moreover, the impact of training seems to have a high body-part specificity, with a maximum impact for those body sections used more prominently during the training. Interestingly, it seems that sleight-of-hand training can lead to a specific improvement of hand mental representation, which relies less on proprioceptive information.
内部身体空间构型对于成功与环境互动以及将我们的身体体验为一个三维立体实体至关重要。这些表征具有高度可塑性，并受到多种传入和运动信息的调节。尽管一些研究报告了感觉和运动调节对身体表征的影响，但感觉信息与自身身体部位心理表征之间的长期关系仍不清楚。我们在一组专业的手法魔术师和一组对魔术一无所知的年龄匹配成年人（对照组）中研究了手部表征。要求参与者在手部位置与心理表征一致时（实验1）以及本体感觉信息“误导”时（实验2）定位手指的地标。在两个实验中，魔术师的表现均优于对照组，这表明对手法的广泛训练对细化手部表征有深远影响。此外，训练的影响似乎具有很高的身体部位特异性，对训练期间使用更突出的身体部位影响最大。有趣的是，手法训练似乎可以导致手部心理表征的特定改善，这种改善较少依赖本体感觉信息。
