Conférence CRNL de Matthew Longo - Distortion of Mental Body Representations

Distortion of Mental Body Representations

Abstract: Our body is central to our sense of self, and distorted body representations are found in several serious medical conditions. In this talk, I will discuss evidence that distortions of body representations are also common in healthy individuals, and occur in domains including tactile spatial perception, proprioception, and the conscious body image. Across domains, there is a general tendency for body width to be overestimated compared to body length. Intriguingly, distortions in both eating disorders and chronic pain appear to be exaggerations of this baseline pattern of distortions, suggesting that these conditions may relate to dysfunction of mechanisms for body perception.

Matt Longo is Professor of cognitive neuroscience, Department of of psychological science, Birkbeck University London. He is the director of the Body Representation Laboratory. His research uses a range of methods from perceptual psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience to investigate the psychological and neural bases of our experience and mental representation of our bodies and how this shapes our perception of the world.