Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
Br J Psychol. 2022 Aug;113(3):758-776. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12558. Epub 2022 Feb 18.
The way human bodies are represented is central in everyday activities. The cognitive system must combine internal, visceral, and somatosensory, signals to external, visually driven information generated from the spatial placement of others' bodies and the own body in the space. However, how different body representations covertly interact among them when observing human body parts is still unclear. Therefore, we investigated the implicit processing of body parts by manipulating either the body part stimuli' posture (conditions a and b) or the participants' response body posture (conditions c, d, and e) in healthy participants (N = 70) using a spatial compatibility task called Sidedness task. The task requires participants to judge the colour of a circle superimposed on a task-irrelevant body part picture. Responses are facilitated when the spatial side of the responding hand corresponds to the spatial code generated by the hand stimulus's position with respect to a body of reference. Results showed that the observation of the task-irrelevant body parts oriented participants' attention and facilitated responses that were spatial compatible with the spatial position such body parts have within a configural representation of the body structure (i.e., Body Structural Representation) in all the five experimental conditions. Notably, the body part stimuli were mentally attached to the body according to the most comfortable and less awkward postures, following the anatomo-physiological constraints. Moreover, the pattern of the results was not influenced by manipulating the participants' response postures, suggesting that the automatic and implicit coding of the body part stimuli does not rely on proprioceptive information about one's body (i.e., Body Schema). We propose that the human body's morphometry knowledge is enriched by biomechanical and anatomo-physiological information about the real body movement possibilities. Moreover, we discuss the importance of the automatic orienting of attention based on the sidedness within the context of imitational learning.
人体的表现方式在日常生活中至关重要。认知系统必须将内部、内脏和体感信号与来自他人身体和自身在空间中位置的外部、视觉驱动的信息相结合。然而，当观察人体部位时，不同的身体表示如何在它们之间进行隐蔽的相互作用仍不清楚。因此，我们通过在健康参与者（N=70）中操纵身体部位刺激的姿势（条件 a 和 b）或参与者的反应身体姿势（条件 c、d 和 e），使用称为 sidedness 任务的空间兼容性任务来研究身体部位的隐式处理。该任务要求参与者判断叠加在与任务无关的身体部位图片上的圆形的颜色。当响应手的空间侧与手刺激相对于参考体的位置生成的空间代码相匹配时，响应会得到促进。结果表明，观察与任务无关的身体部位会引导参与者的注意力，并促进与身体结构的配置表示（即身体结构的 Body Structural Representation）内这些身体部位的空间位置相匹配的响应。值得注意的是，根据最舒适和最不尴尬的姿势，身体部位刺激会在心理上附着在身体上，遵循解剖生理约束。此外，操纵参与者反应姿势的结果模式并没有影响，这表明身体部位刺激的自动和隐式编码不依赖于关于自身身体的本体感受信息（即身体图式）。我们提出，人体形态学知识是通过关于真实身体运动可能性的生物力学和解剖生理信息丰富的。此外，我们还讨论了基于 sidedness 在模仿学习背景下自动定向注意力的重要性。
