The magic hand: Plasticity of mental hand representation

Gianna Cocchini*, Toni Galligan, Laura Mora, Gustav Kuhn

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

<jats:p> Internal spatial body configurations are crucial to successfully interact with the environment and to experience our body as a three-dimensional volumetric entity. These representations are highly malleable and are modulated by a multitude of afferent and motor information. Despite some studies reporting the impact of sensory and motor modulation on body representations, the long-term relationship between sensory information and mental representation of own body parts is still unclear. We investigated hand representation in a group of expert sleight-of-hand magicians and in a group of age-matched adults naïve to magic (controls). Participants were asked to localise landmarks of their fingers when their hand position was congruent with the mental representation (Experiment 1) and when proprioceptive information was “misleading” (Experiment 2). Magicians outperformed controls in both experiments, suggesting that extensive training in sleight of hand has a profound effect in refining hand representation. Moreover, the impact of training seems to have a high body-part specificity, with a maximum impact for those body sections used more prominently during the training. Interestingly, it seems that sleight-of-hand training can lead to a specific improvement of hand mental representation, which relies less on proprioceptive information. </jats:p>
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2314-2324
Number of pages0
JournalQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume71
Issue number11
Early online date1 Jan 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2018

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