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Whole-hand perceptual maps of joint location

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Abstract

Hands play a fundamental role in everyday behaviour. Nevertheless, healthy adults show striking misrepresentations of their hands which have been documented by a wide range of studies addressing various aspects of body representation. For example, when asked to indicate the location within the hand of the knuckles, people place them substantially farther forward than they actually are. Previous research, however, has focused exclusively on the knuckles at the base of each finger, not considering the other knuckles in the fingers. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate conceptual knowledge of the structure of the whole hand, by investigating judgements of the location of all 14 knuckle joints in the hand. Participants localised each of the 14 knuckles of their own hand (Experiment 1) or of the experimenter’s hand (Experiment 2) on a hand silhouette. We measured whether there are systematic localisation biases. The results showed highly similar pattern of mislocalisation for the knuckles of one’s own hand and those of another person’s hand, suggesting that people share an abstract conceptual knowledge about the hand structure. In line with previous reports, we showed that the metacarpophalangeal joints at the base of the fingers are judged as substantially father forward in the hand than they actually are. Moreover, for the first time we showed a gradient of this bias, with progressive reduction of distal bias from more proximal to more distal joints. In sum, people think their finger segments are roughly the same, and that their fingers are shorter than they are.

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Availability of data and material

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

The study was run under control of a custom MATLAB script using Cogent Graphics (developed by John Romaya, Laboratory of Neuroscience, Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London), and the code is available upon from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This research was supported by a Grant from the European Research Council (ERC-2013-StG-336050) under the FP7 to MRL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 7HX, UK

    Kasia A. Myga, Klaudia B. Ambroziak, Luigi Tamè & Matthew R. Longo

  2. School of Psychology, University of Kent, Keyenes College, Canterbury, CT2 7NO, UK

    Luigi Tamè

  3. Integrative Multisensory Perception Action & Cognition Team—ImpAct, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM U1028, CNRS U5292, Lyon, France

    Alessandro Farnè

  4. Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, 43 Boulevard du 11 Novembre 1918, 69100, Villeurbanne, France

    Alessandro Farnè

  5. Hospices Civils de Lyon, Neuro-immersion, Villeurbanne, Lyon, France

    Alessandro Farnè

  6. Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Corso Angelo, Corso Bettini, 31, 38068, Rovereto, TN, Italy

    Alessandro Farnè

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  1. Kasia A. Myga
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  2. Klaudia B. Ambroziak
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  3. Luigi Tamè
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  4. Alessandro Farnè
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  5. Matthew R. Longo
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Contributions

LT, AF, MRL: Conceptualization; KM: Data curation, Formal analysis; MRL: Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; KBA: Project administration; Resources; Software; MRL: Supervision, Validation; KM and MRL: Visualization; KM: Writing—original draft; MRL, LT, AF: Writing—review & editing.

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Correspondence to Kasia A. Myga.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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The procedures were approved by the Department of Psychological Sciences ethics committee at Birkbeck, University of London.

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All participants gave written informed consent and were paid for their participation.

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Participants signed informed consent to publish their data.

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Communicated by Francesco Lacquaniti.

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Myga, K.A., Ambroziak, K.B., Tamè, L. et al. Whole-hand perceptual maps of joint location. Exp Brain Res 239, 1235–1246 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-021-06043-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-021-06043-6

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