Social Touch Somatotopically Affects Mental Body Representations

Abstract

In pre-Covid days, many daily actions such as hand shaking or cheek kissing implied physical contact between our body and that of other people. With respect to touching an inanimate object (objectual touch), touching a person (social touch) concerns not only touching a human body, but also that this body belongs to a living person. This fundamental difference also may affect the way we figure our own movements and perceptions or, in other words, how we mentally represent our own body. To test this hypothesis, we asked 30 neurotypical participants to perform mental rotation of images representing hands, full bodies, and feet (an active cognitive task able to activate body representations without need of moving) in two tactile conditions: holding (one in each hand) either the thumbs of another person (social touch) or two plastic cylinders (objectual touch) of about the same circumference and size. Results showed that only mental rotation of hand images was affected by varying the tactile conditions, in that participants were faster during social than objectual touch. This suggests that the nature of hand-related tactile input (social or objectual touch) influences local (hand) and not global (body) mental representations of the body, and in a very somatotopic manner (hands but not feet). We interpret these findings with reference to the differentiation between sensorimotor (body schema) and visuospatial (body image) dynamics in the mental representation of our body. The present study shows that external social factors can affect the internal mental representations of one's own body.

Keywords: body image; body schema; mental imagery; motor cognition; sensorimotor.