Sex differences in perceptual hand maps: A meta-analysis

Longo, Matthew R.

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.03.002

Cited by 14 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 135 publications

(133 reference statements)

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“…Our findings that there are no differences between how males and females perceive their hand size is not compatible with what has been found in previous studies that looked at sex differences in hand representation [6,20]. Longo [6] recently conducted a meta-analysis of nineteen experiments that used his 'psychomorphometric paradigm' method of mapping the body [1] to examine whether sex differences exist for perceptual hand maps. He concluded that distortions occurred for both males and females but that sex differences exist in the magnitude of distortions in perceptual hand maps, with women showing greater overestimation of hand width and men showing greater underestimation of finger length.…”

Section: Sex and Body Satisfaction Scorescontrasting

confidence: 64%

“…They found that finger length was underestimated in both sexes but hand width was only overestimated in women. Longo [6] speculates that these differences could be explained by how actual hand size (used as a reference) was measured-using a photograph of the hand next to a ruler in his studies compared to Coelho and Gonzalez's method of pointing to landmarks on a non-occluded hand. The latter may not provide an accurate reference due to potential motor control or visual biases with which such localization tasks may be associated.…”

Section: Sex and Body Satisfaction Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The hand has been the main focus for studying various aspects of perception and action such as touch, haptics, motor skills, reaching, grasping, pointing, tool use, position sense, size perception, etc. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and so it is important to get a complete picture of how the hand is represented in the brain. All these sensory processes and tasks require knowledge about how the brain represents the hand and therefore can be impacted by any size or shape distortions that may occur.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The perceived size of the implicit representation of the dorsum and palm of the hand

D’Amour

Harris

2020

PLoS ONE

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The perception of the body and its parts has traditionally been studied using the conscious body image. Here, we determine the implicit representation of the hand. Participants were sequentially shown two life-size images of either the dorsal or palmar surface of their hand. In one interval either the horizontal or vertical dimension of the image was varied using an adaptive staircase, while the other interval contained the full-size, undistorted image. Participants reported which image most closely matched their hand. The staircase honed in on the distorted image that was equally likely to be judged as matching their own hand as the accurate image. The implicit representation was taken as midway between these two images. The experiment was repeated with different hand orientations. Perceived width depended on the orientation, with differences found between the upright and right orientations. Interestingly, the perceived length of the dorsum and palm were different from each other-length of the dorsum was overestimated whereas palm length was perceived accurately. This study reveals distortions of the implicit representation of the hands in healthy individuals.

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Section: Sex and Body Satisfaction Scorescontrasting

confidence: 64%

Section: Sex and Body Satisfaction Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The perceived size of the implicit representation of the dorsum and palm of the hand

D’Amour

Harris

2020

PLoS ONE

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“…A previous study found greater finger length underestimation and reduced hand width overestimation in male participants compared to female participants [ 20 ]. However, these differences were minimized when the participants’ actual hand size was modeled as a covariate, suggesting that they are likely to be related to the physical properties of the hand, rather than to a gender asymmetry, per se [ 8 ]. In detail, authors put forward the possibility that the hand structure may be distorted toward a prototypical hand [ 8 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proprioceptive errors in the localization of hand landmarks: What can be learnt about the hand metric representation?

Peviani

Bottini

2020

PLoS ONE

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Proprioception acquires a crucial role in estimating the configuration of our body segments in space when visual information is not available. Proprioceptive accuracy is assessed by asking participants to match the perceived position of an unseen body landmark through reaching movements. This task was also adopted to study the perceived hand structure by computing the relative distances between averaged proprioceptive judgments (hand Localization Task). However, the pattern of proprioceptive errors leading to the misperceived hand structure is unexplored. Here, we aimed to characterize this pattern across different hand landmarks, having different anatomo-physiological properties and cortical representations. Furthermore, we sought to describe the error consistency and its stability over time. To this purpose, we analyzed the proprioceptive errors of 43 healthy participants during the hand Localization Task. We found larger but more consistent errors for the fingertips compared to the knuckles, possibly due to poorer proprioceptive signal, compensated by other sources of spatial information. Furthermore, we found a shift (overlap effect) and a temporal drift of the hand perceived position towards the shoulder of origin, which was consistent within and between subjects. The overlap effect had a greater influence on lateral compared to medial landmarks, leading to the hand width overestimation. Our results are compatible with domain-general and body-specific spatial biases affecting the proprioceptive localization of the hand landmarks, thus the apparent hand structure misperception.

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“…We found that the full body was perceived as thinner (underestimating width) in the front and back views but when the body was viewed from the side, only females overestimated their width. A parallel can be found in emerging sex differences in hand perception where overestimation of hand width is larger in females (Coelho and Gonzalez, 2019;Longo, 2019). The height of the body was perceived as accurate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

The Representation of Body Size: Variations With Viewpoint and Sex

D’Amour

Harris

2019

Front. Psychol.

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Perceived body size is a fundamental construct that reflects our knowledge of self and is important for all aspects of perception, yet how we perceive our bodies and how the body is represented in the brain is not yet fully understood. In order to understand how the brain perceives and represents the body, we need an objective method that is not vulnerable to affective or cognitive influences. Here, we achieve this by assessing the accuracy of full-body size perception using a novel psychophysical method that taps into the implicit body representation for determining perceived size. Participants were tested with life-size images of their body as seen from different viewpoints with the expectation that greater distortions would occur for unfamiliar views. The Body Shape Questionnaire was also administered. Using a two-alternative forced choice design, participants were sequentially shown two life-size images of their whole body dressed in a standardized tight-fitting outfit seen from the front, side, or back. In one image, the aspect ratio (with the horizontal or vertical dimension fixed) was varied using an adaptive staircase, while the other was undistorted. Participants reported which image most closely matched their own body size. The staircase honed in on the distorted image that was equally likely as the undistorted photo to be judged as matching their perception of themselves. From this, the perceived size of their internal body representation could be calculated. Underestimation of body width was found when the body was viewed from the front or back in both sexes. However, females, but not males, overestimated their width when the body was viewed from the side. Height was perceived accurately in all views. These findings reveal distortions in perceived size for healthy populations and show that both viewpoint and sex matter for the implicit body representation. Though the back view of one's body is rarely-if ever-seen, perceptual distortions were the same as for the front view. This provides insight into how the brain might construct its representation of three-dimensional body shape.

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Sex differences in perceptual hand maps: A meta-analysis

Cited by 14 publications

References 135 publications

The perceived size of the implicit representation of the dorsum and palm of the hand

The perceived size of the implicit representation of the dorsum and palm of the hand

Proprioceptive errors in the localization of hand landmarks: What can be learnt about the hand metric representation?

The Representation of Body Size: Variations With Viewpoint and Sex

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