The Relationship Between Tactile and Visual Distance Estimation and Body Image

Body image is a multisensorial mental representation that consists of both perceptual and attitudinal aspects. Previous research suggests that perception of tactile distances on the body may be distorted in non-clinical populations. However, it remains unclear whether perceptual distortions differ depending on the direction of mapping between the tactile and visual modalities, and whether such distortions are associated with body-image attitudes or eating disorder symptomatology. In the present study, we investigated these questions in a non-clinical sample of 126 participants. Through the administration of multiple questionnaires, we measured subjects’ body image attitudes and eating disorder symptoms. In addition, participants completed two distance-estimation tasks with opposite directions of sensory mapping - Task A, a tactile-to-visual task, and Task B, a visual-to-tactile task. Estimation errors were calculated by subtracting the true target distance from participants’ responses. Results suggested a tendency across participants to underestimate distances in both tasks. Moreover, there was no significant difference in overall estimation accuracy between the tactile-to-visual and visual-to-tactile conditions. These results imply that there was no general directionality effect in perceptual mapping. There was a high internal consistency between the questionnaire scales and they were moderately to strongly intercorrelated. BMI, gender, body-image attitudes, and eating disorder symptoms did not significantly predict estimation error in either task. Exploratory analyses further showed that estimation errors varied across target distances and that this pattern differed between the two tasks. Overall, these results suggest that perceptual distance estimation biases are present in a non-clinical sample, but they are not strongly linked with body-image-related and eating disorder symptomatology questionnaire measures. Furthermore, distance-specific influences on perceptual judgements should be taken into account when examining body representations.