Abstract
Despite the fact that ageing causes dramatic changes in bodily appearance, little is known about how self-body recognition changes across life span. Here, we investigated whether older, compared to younger women, differed in the ability of recognising their own than other women’s body parts and whether this effect was associated to negative body image dispositions. Twenty-eight young (Mage: 25.93 years, SDage = 4.74) and 25 middle-aged (Mage: 54.36 years, SDage = 4.54) women completed an implicit task consisting of visual matching of self and others’ body parts and an explicit self–other body discrimination task. Stimuli comprised of images of body parts of the participant and of other age- and BMI-matched models, which were presented in the original size or modified to look rounder or thinner. Measures of adiposity (i.e. BMI), body image concerns and appearance-related worries for specific body parts and for the whole body were also collected. Whilst both groups showed a self-body advantage in the implicit, but not in the explicit task, the advantage was notably bigger for the younger group. However, the implicit self-advantage was higher in those middle-aged women that displayed more body image concerns and worries for specific body parts. Furthermore, the two groups were comparably less able in recognising their body parts when presented thinner as compared to rounder or in their actual size. Overall, these findings open the possibility that, as women age, their implicit self-recognition abilities may decline in association with more negative body image dispositions.
Highlights
Self-body recognition, which refers to the unique ability in identifying one’s own body and its parts as separate from others (Richetin et al 2012), allows for self–other discrimination, a pivotal cognitive function in social interaction and bodily self-awareness (Conson et al 2010; Uddin et al 2006)
A target image of either their body part or that of another woman was displayed for 500 ms on the screen. This was followed by a visual mask, which was presented for 500 ms and followed by a 500-ms presentation of an image depicting a body part corresponding to the self or other
Our results provide, for the first time, evidence that age is a factor contributing towards alterations of the implicit and explicit perceptual processing of body parts
Summary
Self-body recognition, which refers to the unique ability in identifying one’s own body and its parts as separate from others (Richetin et al 2012), allows for self–other discrimination, a pivotal cognitive function in social interaction and bodily self-awareness (Conson et al 2010; Uddin et al 2006). Whilst patients with right hemisphere lesions, as compared to healthy controls and patients with left hemisphere lesions, were impaired in both the implicit and the explicit self-body processing tasks, the deficits in the two tasks were associated with damage to different regions of the right hemisphere (Frassinetti et al 2008). Taken all together, these studies support the notion of a two-way access to self-body knowledge, which involves separate cognitive processes and neural mechanisms. Whilst a sensorimotor body representation (including proprioceptive and motor information) is engaged in the implicit recognition of one’s own body parts, the explicit recognition of one’s own body parts might be instead merely supported by a visual perceptual facilitation (Ferri et al 2012)
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