关键词: 身体表征, 二分模型, 身体图式, 身体意象, 身体错觉

Abstract: Knowing ourselves and controlling ourselves is something that we take for granted. However, in this ordinary phenomenon, it contains complex psychological mechanisms. Body representation plays an important role in it. Body representation is considered to be the mapping of the body in the brain and it is a coherent mental representation constructed by multiple sensory inputs. The view that body representation is separable was first proposed by neuropathologists Head and Holmes in 1911. After that, body representation as a multi-dimensional concept, has gained wide consensus. In the past ten years, with the body representation has received more and more attention, the body schema, body image, body structural description and body semantics have gradually entered people's field of vision. However, there is disagreement on the number and definitions of body representations. A dyadic taxonomy which is widely accepted in the current cognitive science suggests distinguishing between body schema and body image. Body schema consists in sensorimotor representations of the body that guide actions, and enables the body to unconsciously adjust the posture and movement, so that many meaningful parts of the world are integrated into our experience. Body image groups all the other representations about the body that are not used for action, whether they are perceptual, conceptual or emotional. It has been defined as a more stable and internal perceptual representation of the body. In order to find evidence supporting the dyadic taxonomy, we focused on patients with neurological disorders and healthy subjects involved in the rubber hand illusion experiment and its paradigm. For some patients with micromelia and brain-damaged, such as phocomelia, and autotopagnosia, they cannot correctly recognize themselves due to the dissociation of body representation. Although healthy individuals do not lose a certain part of the body representation, their perception of self will be biased because of multisensory conflict, which is resulted in rubber hand illusion and full-body illusion. We then explore the internal mechanism from the perspectives of consciousness and unconsciousness, top-down and bottom-up, which provide a strong basis for the validity of the dyadic taxonomy. Body schema is an unconscious, bottom-up and dynamic representation, relying on proprioceptive information and involved in enabling and monitoring motor actions. Body image is considered to be a more conscious, top-down, cognitive representation, mostly used to make perceptual judgements. In conclusion, we provide a lot of evidence for the rationality of the dyadic taxonomy. However, we also find that there are still many problems to be solved. First of all, the concept of body image is still controversial. Whether it can continue to separate is still unknown. Secondly, the internal separation basis of the dyadic taxonomy cannot completely separate the body schema from the body image. In other words, the body schema is closely related to the body image, and it is difficult to completely separate them. Furthermore, there are few empirical studies based on the dissociation of body representation. Therefore, future research needs to address the above problems, and sort out more systematic classification standards at the conceptual level to find a clearer boundary between the body schema and body image. In addition, virtual reality technology can be used for more in-depth research.

Key words: body representation, the dyadic taxonomy, body schema, body image, body illusion