The way human bodies are represented is central in everyday activities. The cognitive system must combine internal, visceral, and somatosensory, signals to external, visually driven information generated from the spatial placement of others' bodies and the own body in the space. However, how different body representations covertly interact among them when observing human body parts is still unclear. Therefore, we investigated the implicit processing of body parts by manipulating either the body part stimuli' posture (conditions a and b) or the participants' response body posture (conditions c, d, and e) in healthy participants (N = 70) using a spatial compatibility task called Sidedness task. The task requires participants to judge the colour of a circle superimposed on a task-irrelevant body part picture. Responses are facilitated when the spatial side of the responding hand corresponds to the spatial code generated by the hand stimulus's position with respect to a body of reference. Results showed that the observation of the task-irrelevant body parts oriented participants' attention and facilitated responses that were spatial compatible with the spatial position such body parts have within a configural representation of the body structure (i.e., Body Structural Representation) in all the five experimental conditions. Notably, the body part stimuli were mentally attached to the body according to the most comfortable and less awkward postures, following the anatomo-physiological constraints. Moreover, the pattern of the results was not influenced by manipulating the participants' response postures, suggesting that the automatic and implicit coding of the body part stimuli does not rely on proprioceptive information about one's body (i.e., Body Schema). We propose that the human body's morphometry knowledge is enriched by biomechanical and anatomo-physiological information about the real body movement possibilities. Moreover, we discuss the importance of the automatic orienting of attention based on the sidedness within the context of imitational learning.

中文翻译：

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身体会与身体对话​​吗？观察他人身体部位时不同身体表征之间的关系。

人体的表现方式是日常活动的核心。认知系统必须将内部、内脏和体感信号与外部的、视觉驱动的信息结合起来，这些信息是由他人身体和自己身体在空间中的空间位置产生的。然而，在观察人体部位时，不同的身体表征如何在它们之间秘密地相互作用仍不清楚。因此，我们通过操纵健康参与者（N = 70）的身体部位刺激姿势（条件 a 和 b）或参与者的反应身体姿势（条件 c、d 和 e）来研究身体部位的隐含处理。称为 Sidedness 任务的空间兼容性任务。该任务要求参与者判断叠加在与任务无关的身体部位图片上的圆圈的颜色。当响应手的空间侧对应于由手部刺激相对于参考体的位置生成的空间代码时，会促进响应。结果表明，对与任务无关的身体部位的观察会引导参与者的注意力，并促进与这些身体部位在所有五个身体结构的配置表示（即身体结构表示）内的空间位置兼容的反应。实验条件。值得注意的是，身体部位刺激在精神上依附在身体上，按照最舒适和不那么尴尬的姿势，遵循解剖生理学的限制。此外，结果的模式不受操纵参与者反应姿势的影响，表明身体部位刺激的自动和隐含编码不依赖于关于一个人身体的本体感受信息（即身体图式）。我们建议人体的形态测量知识通过有关真实身体运动可能性的生物力学和解剖生理学信息来丰富。此外，我们讨论了在模仿学习背景下基于侧向性的注意力自动定向的重要性。