“…In line with this view, we and other authors have suggested that primary tactile processing responsible for detecting an object in contact with the skin, can be anatomically and functionally dissociated from a secondary higher-order tactile processing, such as the discrimination of the sizes of objects touching different body parts (Serino et al, 2008;Gallace and Spence, 2009;Spitoni et al, 2010Spitoni et al, , 2013 We have proposed that, in order to extract metric information from the skin surface, the brain has to link information related to the single locations on the skin where touch is applied with a representation of the stimulated body part, and therefore, a "tactile size estimation task" can be used as an implicit proxy of the body representations. (Keizer et al, 2011(Keizer et al, , 2012) used a tactile size estimation task to study tactile performance in patients suffering from AN and they found that relative to controls, AN patients overestimated the distance between two tactile stimuli for the stimulated body parts. According to the authors, this evidence result from top-down influences of body dissatisfaction on the body representations.…”