scholarly journals Visual body size adaptation and estimation of tactile distance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regine Zopf ◽  
Veronika Kosourikhina ◽  
Kevin R. Brooks ◽  
Vince Polito ◽  
Ian Stephen

Estimating the size of bodies is crucial for interactions with physical and social environments. Body size perception is malleable and can be altered using visual adaptation paradigms. However, it is unclear whether such visual adaptation effects also transfer to other modalities and influence, for example, the perception of tactile distances. In this study we employed a visual adaptation paradigm. Participants were exposed to images of expanded or contracted versions of self- or other-identity bodies. Before and after this adaptation they were asked to manipulate the width of body images to appear as “normal” as possible. We replicated an effect of visual adaptation, such that the body size selected as most “normal” was larger after exposure to expanded and thinner after exposure to contracted adaptation stimuli. In contrast, we did not find evidence that this adaptation effect transfers to distance estimates for paired tactile stimuli delivered to the abdomen. A Bayesian analysis showed that our data provide moderate evidence that there is no effect of visual body size adaptation on the estimation of spatial parameters in a tactile task. This suggests that visual body size adaptation effects do not transfer to somatosensory body size representations.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anouk Keizer ◽  
Manja Engel

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder that mainly affects young women. One of the most striking symptoms of this disorder is the distorted experience of body size and shape. Patients are by definition underweight, but experience and perceive their body as bigger than it in reality is. This body representation disturbance has fascinated scientists for many decades, leading to a rich and diverse body of literature on this topic. Research shows that AN patients do not only think that their body is bigger than reality, and visually perceive it as such, but that other sensory modalities also play an important role in oversized body experiences. Patients for example have an altered (enlarged) size perception of tactile stimuli, and move their body as if it is larger than it actually is. Moreover, patients with AN appear to process and integrate multisensory information differently than healthy individuals, especially in relation to body size. This leads to the conclusion that the representation of the size of the body in the brain is enlarged. This conclusion has important implications for the treatment of body representation disturbances in AN. Traditionally treatment of AN is very cognitive in nature, it is possible however that changed cognitions with respect to body size experiences do not lead to actual changes in metric representations of body size stored in the brain. Recently a few studies have been published in which a multisensory approach in treatment of body representation disturbance in AN has been found to be effective in treating this symptom of AN.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin R. Brooks ◽  
Evelyn Baldry ◽  
Jon Mond ◽  
Dick stevenson ◽  
Deborah Mitchison ◽  
...  

Prolonged exposure to wide (thin) bodies causes a perceptual aftereffect such that subsequently-viewed bodies appear thinner (wider) than they actually are. This phenomenon is known as visual adaptation. We used the adaptation paradigm to examine the gender selectivity of the neural mechanisms encoding body size and shape. Observers adjusted female and male test bodies to appear normal-sized both before and after adaptation to bodies digitally altered to appear heavier or lighter. In Experiment 1, observers adapted simultaneously to bodies of each gender distorted in opposite directions, e.g. thin females and wide males. The direction of resultant aftereffects was contingent on the gender of the test stimulus, such that in this example female test bodies appeared wider while male test bodies appeared thinner. This indicates at least some separation of the neural mechanisms processing body size and shape for the two genders. In Experiment 2, adaptation involved either wide females, thin females, wide males or thin males. Aftereffects were present in all conditions, but were stronger when test and adaptation genders were congruent, suggesting some overlap in the tuning of gender-selective neural mechanisms. Given that visual adaptation has been implicated in real-world examples of body size and shape misperception (e.g. in anorexia nervosa or obesity), these results may have implications for the development of body image therapies based on the adaptation model.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 173 ◽  
Author(s):  
María-Pilar León ◽  
Irene González-Martí ◽  
Juan-Gregorio Fernández-Bustos ◽  
Onofre Contreras

<p>perception and dissatisfaction.  Though most research studies focus on adolescence and adulthood, dissatisfaction problems are manifesting themselves at increasingly early ages.  The aim of this study was, therefore, to analyse the most significant findings on body dissatisfaction and body-size perception among children aged 3 to 6 (second cycle of pre-school education).  To this end the Medline, SportDiscus, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Dialnet, ProQuest and EBSCO databases were used, and from which a total of 22 studies were selected in accordance with exclusion criteria such as language, peer review and the objective measurement of the body mass index (BMI) of children.  In terms of levels of dissatisfaction, results vary widely, making it impossible to draw sound conclusions on the nature and prevalence of this variable at these ages.  The main reasons for this include the type of instrument used and the difficulties children had in perceiving their bodies correctly.</p>


PLoS ONE ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. e0189855 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian D. Stephen ◽  
Daniel Sturman ◽  
Richard J. Stevenson ◽  
Jonathan Mond ◽  
Kevin R. Brooks

1986 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. V. Muralidhara ◽  
P. S. Shetty

1. Nutritional deprivation was induced preweaning in Wistar rats by increasing the litter size to sixteen, while paired litters with only five pups served as controls. The nutritionally deprived pups were rehabilitated after weaning by ad lib. access to an adequate diet.2. The body-weights and body lengths were significantly lower in the nutritionally deprived group and significant differences persisted even after 9 weeks of rehabilitation.3. The body temperature of the nutritionally deprived animals was significantly lower than that of their paired controls, both before and following nutritional rehabilitation, except for a short period after weaning when the nutritionally deprived animals were initially given the diet ad lib.4. The resting oxygen consumption of the nutritionally deprived animals was comparable to that of the controls when corrected for metabolic body size, both before and after weaning. Noradrenaline-stimulated increase in 02 consumption (non-shivering thermogenesis; NST) was reduced by 50% at weaning in the nutritionally deprived animals and returned to levels comparable to those of controls within a short period of rehabilitation.5. The decrease in NST capacity seen in the nutritionally deprived animals was associated with an inability to thermoregulate when exposed to cold (5°), resulting in death. Cold-induced thermogenesis (CIT) also reappeared soon after nutritional rehabilitation.6. Reduction in metabolic rate, NST and CIT seen in the animals nutritionally deprived preweaning was short-lived and disappeared soon after nutritional rehabilitation. Rapid reversal of these physiological changes indicates that they do not confer any long-term benefit or change in metabolic efficiency and are unlike the changes in body size and growth which do not completely recover following nutritional rehabilitation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 709 ◽  
pp. 648-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
X. X. Wang ◽  
Z. N. Wu

AbstractThe effect of the body on the lift force in hovering flight is studied here by including the effect of image vortex rings (IVRs) in the inviscid vortex ring model proposed by Rayner (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 91, 1979, pp. 697–730) and used by Wang & Wu (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 654, 2010, pp. 453–472) to study lift force due to wakes. The body is treated simply as an equivalent sphere following the data of Ellington (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, vol. 305, 1984a, pp. 17–40). It is shown that the body image reduces the lift by inducing a further downwash near the wing tip and an additional contraction to the real vortex rings (RVRs). The amount of force reduction due to body image is found to grow cubically with relative body size, defined by the equivalent radius relative to the wing span, and approximately linearly with the feathering parameter. For Apis and Bombus with large relative body size and large feathering parameter, the body images reduce lift by an amount near 8 % according to the present simplified analysis.


2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ratanasiripong ◽  
Heidi Burkey

The present study investigated actual body size as measured by the Body Mass Index in comparison to self-reported body size among diverse college student population. The study was conducted at a large public university in the western United States. Of the random sample of 15,000 enrolled students selected to receive an electronic survey, a total of 1,798 students elected to participate. Normalizing of overweight and obesity was found among study participants. The results from this survey indicate that, despite the fact that the majority of participants engaged in weight management methods, all gender and ethnic groups underreported instances of overweight and obesity, as well as discrepancies between perceived body image and actual body size. Implications for health promotion and future research are highlighted.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 204380871983713
Author(s):  
Samantha Withnell ◽  
Christopher R. Sears ◽  
Kristin M. von Ranson

Understanding attentional biases associated with body dissatisfaction can aid in devising and refining programs to reduce body dissatisfaction. This study compared attention to images of women’s bodies before and after a body satisfaction or body dissatisfaction priming task. Attention was assessed using eye-gaze tracking, by measuring participants’ fixations to images of “thin” models, “fat” models, and images of average women over an 8-s presentation. Women with high ( n = 65) and low ( n = 43) levels of trait body dissatisfaction, as measured by the Body Shape Questionnaire, were randomly assigned to a body satisfaction or body dissatisfaction priming task. Results indicated that both priming tasks were effective at modifying participants’ state body satisfaction. Women with high body dissatisfaction exhibited an attentional bias to thin and fat model images prior to the priming procedure, replicating previous findings. Contrary to predictions, body dissatisfaction priming increased attention to body images for women with both high and low body dissatisfaction, whereas body satisfaction priming had no effect on attention for either group. These findings show that women with high and low body dissatisfaction are vulnerable to the effects of body dissatisfaction priming.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Martel ◽  
Livio Finos ◽  
Eric Koun ◽  
Alessandro Farnè ◽  
Alice Catherine Roy

AbstractHumans evolution is distinctly characterized by their exquisite mastery of tools, allowing them to shape their environment in more elaborate ways compared to other species. This ability is present ever since infancy and most theories indicate that children become proficient with tool use very early. In adults, tool use has been shown to plastically modify metric aspects of the arm representation, as indexed by changes in movement kinematics. To date, whether and when the plastic capability of updating the body representation develops during childhood remains unknown. This question is particularly important since body representation plasticity could be impacted by the fact that the human body takes years to achieve a stable metric configuration. Here we assessed the kinematics of 90 young participants (8–21 years old) required to reach for an object before and after tool use, as a function of their pubertal development. Results revealed that tool incorporation, as indexed by the adult typical kinematic pattern, develops very slowly and displays a u-shaped developmental trajectory. From early to mid puberty, the changes in kinematics following tool use seem to reflect a shortened arm representation, opposite to what was previously reported in adults. This pattern starts reversing after mid puberty, which is characterized by the lack of any kinematics change following tool use. The typical adult-like pattern emerges only at late puberty, when body size is stable. These findings reveal the complex dynamics of tool incorporation across development, possibly indexing the transition from a vision-based to a proprioception-based body representation plasticity.


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