For example, while you’re sitting at a computer reading this article, your brain is receiving tactile information from receptors in your skin activated by the sensation of clothing and the pressure on your body from sitting in a chair, auditory information conveying any music or ambient noise that is currently tickling the hair cells in your ears, visual information from the light hitting your retina produced by your computer or phone, proprioceptive information about the relative position of your body parts with respect to one another, and much more.

In this review, we detail the major findings from this research, and highlight areas of convergence with other cognitive neuroscience disciplines.Our brains are constantly bombarded by a barrage of sensory data. The crossmodal congruency task has been used to investigate a number of questions related to the representation of space in both normal participants and brain-damaged patients. Crossmodal congruency effects (calculated as performance on incongruent − congruent trials) are greatest when visual and vibrotactile stimuli are presented from the same azimuthal location, thus providing an index of common position across different sensory modalities. We highlight recent research on this topic using the crossmodal congruency task, in which participants make speeded elevation discrimination responses to vibrotactile targets presented to the thumb or index finger, while simultaneously trying to ignore irrelevant visual distractors presented from either the same (i.e., congruent) or a different (i.e., incongruent) elevation. In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the question of how these various sensory cues are weighted and integrated in order to enable people to localize tactile stimuli, as well as to give rise to the `felt' position of our limbs, and ultimately the multisensory representation of 3-D peripersonal space. This involves the multisensory integration of visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and even auditory cues regarding limb position.

In order to determine precisely the location of a tactile stimulus presented to the hand it is necessary to know not only which part of the body has been stimulated, but also where that part of the body lies in space. Thus, it would appear that fake limbs can be incorporated into the body schema as well as the body image, but while multiple limbs can be incorporated into the body image, the body schema can accommodate only one. When both fake hands were synchronous, ownership was claimed over both, but only one was controlled. When only one was synchronous during active touch, ownership was claimed for the synchronous hand only and the accuracy of reaching was consistent with control of the synchronous hand. Participants were presented with two moving fake left hands. The current study challenges and extends these findings by demonstrating that active synchronous stroking of a brush not only elicits perceptual embodiment of a fake limb (body image) but also affects subsequent reaching error (body schema). Recent evidence from the RHI supports a distinction between bodily representations for perception (body image) and for action (body schema) (Kammers et al. Such demonstrations highlight the dynamic flexibility of the perceptual body image, but evidence for comparable RHI-sensitive changes in the body schema used for action is less common. The foundation has been provided by firmly rooting choreutics within the context of spatial cognition and motor control.ĭemonstrations that the brain can incorporate a fake limb into our bodily representations when stroked in synchrony with our unseen real hand are now commonplace. The explicit identification of these cognitive structures in spatial cognition research gives psychological validity to their fundamental role within the choreutic conception.This research been a beginning in defining the range of kinesthetic spatial knowledge. 4) Symmetrical transformations are often performed on spatial information. 3) Individual locations are eventually collected into cognitive map-like spatial images of an entire environment. 2) Mental representations of kinesthetic spatial knowledge are based on a code of elemental locations. Briefly stated these are: 1) Spatial information is interpreted according to various systems of reference. four cognitive structures* used in choreutics were identified as having also been well developed in studies of spatial cognition and motor control.

The choreutic conception can be reevaluated according to knowledge about kinesthetic spatial cognition.

Human perception definition