Manser-Smith Kelda, Tamè Luigi, Longo Matthew R
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom; School of Psychology, University of Kent, United Kingdom.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2019 Aug;199:102900. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.102900. Epub 2019 Aug 7.
There are many similarities and differences between the human hands and feet. On a psychological level, there is some evidence from clinical disorders and studies of tactile localisation in healthy adults for deep functional connections between the hands and feet. One form these connections may take is in common high-level mental representations of the hands and feet. Previous studies have shown that there are systematic, but distinct patterns of confusion found between both the fingers and toes. Further, there are clear individual differences between people in the exact patterns of mislocalisations. Here, we investigated whether these idiosyncratic differences in tactile localisation are shared between the fingers and toes, which may indicate a shared high-level representation. We obtained confusion matrices showing the pattern of mislocalisation on the hairy skin surfaces of both the fingers and toes. Using a decoding approach, we show that idiosyncratic differences in individuals' pattern of confusions are shared across the fingers and toes, despite different overall patterns of confusions. These results suggest that there is a common representation of the fingers and toes.
人类的手和脚之间存在许多异同之处。在心理层面，临床疾病以及对健康成年人触觉定位的研究提供了一些证据，表明手和脚之间存在深层次的功能联系。这些联系可能采取的一种形式是手和脚在高层次心理表征上的共性。先前的研究表明，手指和脚趾之间存在系统性但又截然不同的混淆模式。此外，人们在错误定位的确切模式上存在明显的个体差异。在此，我们研究了触觉定位中的这些个体差异是否在手指和脚趾之间共享，这可能表明存在共享的高层次表征。我们获得了混淆矩阵，展示了手指和脚趾毛发皮肤表面的错误定位模式。使用解码方法，我们表明，尽管混淆的总体模式不同，但个体混淆模式中的个体差异在手指和脚趾之间是共享的。这些结果表明，手指和脚趾存在共同的表征。
