The Effects of Sex and Response Type on Body Schema Plasticity: A Novel Tactile Perception Task with Tools
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2012
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
The brain uses a constantly updated body schema to collectively represent the size and position of each and every body part. When we use a tool to interact with our environment more efficiently, it becomes integrated into our body schema. The tactile temporal order judgment (TOJ) task provides a reliable measure of this integration. In the current study, we sought to replicate the effect of hand and tool position through four distinct versions of the tactile TOJ task. In contrast with previous findings, our data was characterized by an effect of hand posture instead of tool posture. We found that TOJ performance was heavily influenced by response type, which contributed to a significant sex by response type interaction resulting in poor female performance with foot pedals. These distinct patterns of performance stand out prominently in exceptionally small field of tool-based tactile TOJ tasks.