Beyond body image: what body schema and motor imagery can tell us about the way patients with anorexia nervosa experience their body

Abstract

Aim Recent evidence suggests that the body image disturbance often observed in patients with anorexia nervosa also extends to the body schema. According to the embodiment approach, the body schema is not only involved in motor execution, but also in tasks that only require a mental simulation of a movement such as motor imagery, mental rotation of bodies, and visuospatial perspective-taking. The aim of the present study was to assess the ability of patients with anorexia in mentally simulate movements.Methods The sample included 52 patients with acute anorexia and 62 healthy controls. All participants completed three tests of explicit motor imagery, a mental rotation test and a test of visuospatial perspective-taking. ResultsPatients with anorexia nervosa, with respect to controls, reported greater difficulties in imagining movements according to a first-person perspective, lower accuracy in motor imagery, selective impairment in the mental rotation of human figures, and reduced ability in assuming a different egocentric visuospatial perspective. ConclusionThese results are indicative of a specific alteration in motor imagery in patients with anorexia nervosa. Interestingly, patients' difficulties appear to be limited to those tasks which specifically rely on the body schema, while patients and controls performed similarly in the 3D objects mental rotation task.

Linguistic embodiment in typical and atypical anorexia nervosa: Evidence from an image‐word matching task

“…One cognitive mechanism that has been proposed for the impaired body image in AN is the presence of an abnormal updating process of body schema, where top‐down control plays a key role in updating body schema representations (Riva et al., 2014). Explicit motor imagery abilities are impaired in individuals with AN, indicating difficulties in body schema tasks and motor imagery (Meregalli et al., 2022). Morphological analyses have found a disruption in the integration of somatosensory and visuospatial information in individuals with AN even after weight recovery, indicating that a neural substrate may play a role in the development and maintenance of embodiment impairments and body processing (Favaro et al., 2012).…”