Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL
Volume 144, Issue 1, Pages 103-113Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/xge0000028
Keywords
body perception; visual perception; somatosensation; proprioception
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Funding
- Alexander von Humboldt foundation
- Brain Korea 21 PLUS Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea - Ministry of Education
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Given that observing one's body is ubiquitous in experience, it is natural to assume that people accurately perceive the relative sizes of their body parts. This assumption is mistaken. In a series of studies, we show that there are dramatic systematic distortions in the perception of bodily proportions, as assessed by visual estimation tasks, where participants were asked to compare the lengths of two body parts. These distortions are not evident when participants estimate the extent of a body part relative to a noncorporeal object or when asked to estimate noncorporal objects that are the same length as their body parts. Our results reveal a radical asymmetry in the perception of corporeal and noncorporeal relative size estimates. Our findings also suggest that people visually perceive the relative size of their body parts as a function of each part's relative tactile sensitivity and physical size.
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