What is the body schema?

All of us have a stable perception of our body. We know whether we are sitting or standing, whether our left hand covers our right, and whether our feet are currently higher than our knees. Our sense of body not only includes its current configuration, but also knowledge of the relative locations of its parts and what actions it can perform. Despite our intimate knowledge of bodies, neurological and psychological research present conflicting pictures regarding the properties of our body representations. The term “body schema” has been used to refer to both general body knowledge and immediate body perception. These two concepts are typically confounded in the literature, leading to much confusion over the nature of the body schema. This chapter emphasizes and elucidates the different characteristics of the body schema and body percept. The distinction between these two concepts helps clarify current uncertainty regarding the neural substrates of body representation, contributions from sensory inputs to body representations, and distinctions between body and object representations.

“Body schema” has been frequently used to refer to long-term, organized knowledge about the spatial characteristics of human bodies. Taken in this sense, it refers to a particular class of long-term representations and can be placed in juxtaposition to other object representations. In this chapter, body schema denotes this type of representation. The body schema includes the invariant properties of the human body.