Recall of the visual body image using a novel boundary detection task.
A new task for eliciting a pictorial mental image of the body or other objects is described. The task involved relating a pair of crosses to the boundary of a mental image 'projected' onto a computer screen. Responses were assessed for accuracy defined as identifying a relationship between a cross and an image that would hold when a photograph (of the same object) was substituted for the mental image. A group of 30 female students achieved between 70 to 80% accuracy when using this task to assess mental images of their own faces, torsos, or a familiar nonbody object. Accuracy was similar for body and nonbody objects. The presence of some kind of quasipictorial representation of the body is confirmed. Its characteristics await further elucidation.
Ben-Tovim
D I
DI
Department of Psychiatry, Flinders Medical Centre, Australia.
Walker
M K
MK
D001828:Body Image; D003196:Computer Graphics; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D007600:Judgment; D008568:Memory; D012984:Software; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception