Misalignment between perceptual boundaries and weight categories reflects a new normal for body size perception.

Combatting the current global epidemic of obesity requires that people have a realistic understanding of what a healthy body size looks like. This is a particular issue in different population sub-groups, where there may be increased susceptibility to obesity-related diseases. Prior research has been unable to systematically assess body size judgement due to a lack of attention to gender and race; our study aimed to identify the contribution of these factors.

Eye Movement Dynamics Differ between Encoding and Recognition of Faces.

Facial recognition is widely thought to involve a holistic perceptual process, and optimal recognition performance can be rapidly achieved within two fixations. However, is facial identity encoding likewise holistic and rapid, and how do gaze dynamics during encoding relate to recognition? While having eye movements tracked, participants completed an encoding ("study") phase and subsequent recognition ("test") phase, each divided into blocks of one- or five-second stimulus presentation time conditions to distinguish the influences of experimental phase (encoding/recognition) and stimulus presentation time (short/long). Within the first two fixations, several differences between encoding and recognition were evident in the temporal and spatial dynamics of the eye-movements.

Visual responsiveness in sensorimotor cortex is increased following amputation and reduced after mirror therapy.

Phantom limb pain (PLP) following amputation, which is experienced by the vast majority of amputees, has been reported to be relieved with daily sessions of mirror therapy. During each session, a mirror is used to view the reflected image of the intact limb moving, providing visual feedback consistent with the movement of the missing/phantom limb. To investigate potential neural correlates of the treatment effect, we measured brain responses in volunteers with unilateral leg amputation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a four-week course of mirror therapy.

Trajectory of phantom limb pain relief using mirror therapy: Retrospective analysis of two studies.

Background And Purpose: Research indicates that mirror therapy reduces phantom limb pain (PLP). Objectives were to determine when mirror therapy works in those who respond to treatment, the relevance of baseline PLP to when pain relief occurs, and what pain symptoms respond to mirror therapy.

Methods: Data from two independent cohorts with unilateral lower limb amputation were analyzed for this study (n=33).

Where You Look Matters for Body Perception: Preferred Gaze Location Contributes to the Body Inversion Effect.

The Body Inversion Effect (BIE; reduced visual discrimination performance for inverted compared to upright bodies) suggests that bodies are visually processed configurally; however, the specific importance of head posture information in the BIE has been indicated in reports of BIE reduction for whole bodies with fixed head position and for headless bodies. Through measurement of gaze patterns and investigation of the causal relation of fixation location to visual body discrimination performance, the present study reveals joint contributions of feature and configuration processing to visual body discrimination. Participants predominantly gazed at the (body-centric) upper body for upright bodies and the lower body for inverted bodies in the context of an experimental paradigm directly comparable to that of prior studies of the BIE.

Seeing is not feeling: posterior parietal but not somatosensory cortex engagement during touch observation.

Observing touch has been reported to elicit activation in human primary and secondary somatosensory cortices and is suggested to underlie our ability to interpret other's behavior and potentially empathy. However, despite these reports, there are a large number of inconsistencies in terms of the precise topography of activation, the extent of hemispheric lateralization, and what aspects of the stimulus are necessary to drive responses. To address these issues, we investigated the localization and functional properties of regions responsive to observed touch in a large group of participants (n = 40).

Functional organization and visual representations of human ventral lateral prefrontal cortex.

Recent neuroimaging studies in both human and non-human primates have identified face selective activation in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) even in the absence of working memory (WM) demands. Further, research has suggested that this face-selective response is largely driven by the presence of the eyes. However, the nature and origin of visual category responses in the VLPFC remain unclear.

Faces and eyes in human lateral prefrontal cortex.

Much of the work on face-selective neural activity has focused on posterior, ventral areas of the human and non-human primate brain. However, electrophysiological and fMRI studies have identified face responses in the prefrontal cortex. Here we used fMRI to characterize these responses in the human prefrontal cortex compared with face selectivity in posterior ventral region.

Differential contributions of occipitotemporal regions to person perception.

Downing and Peelen have produced an excellent review synthesizing the current literature on the processing of body stimuli in visual cortex. However, while they consider the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA) and Fusiform Body Area (FBA) in combination, these regions are physically separate in cortex and must contribute differentially to person perception. Here, we evaluate the hierarchical view of processing in EBA and FBA and highlight the visual field biases in these regions, which may provide insight into their origin and functional roles.

Cortical representations of bodies and faces are strongest in commonly experienced configurations.

Faces and bodies are perhaps the most salient and evolutionarily important visual stimuli. Using human functional imaging, we found that the strength of face and body representations depends on long-term experience. Representations were strongest for stimuli in their typical combinations of visual field and side (for example, left field, right body), although all conditions were simply reflections and translations of one another.

The effect of viewpoint on body representation in the extrastriate body area.

Functional neuroimaging has revealed several brain regions that are selective for the visual appearance of others, in particular the face. More recent evidence points to a lateral temporal region that responds to the visual appearance of the human body (extrastriate body area or EBA). We tested whether this region distinguishes between egocentric and allocentric views of the self and other people.