Body Representations and Touch

What do you touch in your day-to-day life? Imagine all the soft and hard textures, some memorable and some forgettable: your hands searching for something among the items at the bottom of a bag, the soft fur and paws of a cat, and the coldness of the metal pole on the subway. These experiences remind you of where your body is, how it feels, and what it means to be you. Touch isn’t just about sensing your environment but also about sensing your self.

In this post, we’ll explore how touch not only informs us about the world but also plays a central role in how we understand and represent our bodies. We’ll look at both the science behind these experiences and the deeper philosophical questions they raise.

Body Schema vs. Body Image

Ratcliffe (2008) suggests that during tactile experiences, the boundaries between self and world are not sharply defined. Unlike vision, which can provide a sense of the external world without involving a sense of self, touch inherently includes both the toucher and the touched. This makes touch uniquely immersive: it places us in the world through the relational reality that it constructs. Additionally, proprioception—the sense of body position and movement—is always integrated with touch, contributing to a unified experience of self interacting with the world. 

The body schema is a momentary mental representation of the body, that includes the unconscious awareness of our body’s position and motion. It’s what guides our actions in day-to-day life: without a body schema, we wouldn’t have a sense of our bodily presence and what our bodies could or could not do in a given moment. This internal map is constantly updated through sensory and motor input, by our sensations and movements (De Vignemont, 2010; Gallagher, 2006).

Body image, on the other hand refers to a more reflective and visual representation of our body. It includes how we see, feel, and think about our body, and how we view it from a third-person perspective in our minds. It’s influenced by emotions, beliefs, and social factors. Touch influences body image. For instance, people with body image concerns often report discomfort with being touched in certain areas (Cazzato et al., 2021). Moreover, those who felt more cared for through physical touch in childhood tend to report greater body satisfaction as adults (Gupta & Schork, 1995).

Mental body representation is a broader concept that encompasses both body schema and body image, as well as their dynamic interaction (Serino & Haggard, 2010). A striking demonstration of the relationship between mental body representation and touch is the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). In this illusion, when a rubber hand is stroked simultaneously with a person’s hidden real hand, many individuals begin to feel as though the rubber hand is part of their own body. This phenomenon highlights a fundamental aspect of bodily self-perception: our representation of our bodies can dynamically change, and touch experiences play a key role in this process. Touch does more than provide information about objects or surfaces, it actively contributes to the construction of our bodily self.

As research on touch continues to expand, we encounter this important question: How do the different touch experiences shape the way we perceive, experience, and represent our body?
 

To learn more about ConTakt Lab's touch research, visit: https://tu-dresden.de/ing/elektrotechnik/ias/socialtouch

References

Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands ‘feel’touch that eyes see. Nature, 391(6669), 756–756.

Cazzato, V., Sacchetti, S., Shin, S., Makdani, A., Trotter, P. D., & McGlone, F. (2021). Affective touch topography and body image. Plos One, 16(11), e0243680.

De Vignemont, F. (2010). Body schema and body image—Pros and cons. Neuropsychologia, 48(3), 669–680.

Gallagher, S. (2006). How the body shapes the mind. Clarendon press.

Gupta, M. A., & Schork, N. J. (1995). Touch deprivation has an adverse effect on body image: Some preliminary observations. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 17(2), 185–189.

Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Touch and situatedness. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16(3), 299–322.

Serino, A., & Haggard, P. (2010). Touch and the body. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 34(2), 224–236.