Does the body image exist in three dimensions? The study of visual mental representation of a body and a nonbody object

Do the mental images of 3-dimensional objects recreate the depth characteri stics of the original objects? This investigation of the characteristics of mental images utilized a novel boundary-detection task that required parti cipants to relate a pair of crosses to the boundary of an image mentally pr ojected onto a computer screen. 48 female participants with body attitudes within expected normal range were asked to image their own body anti a fami liar object from the front and the side. When the visual mental image was d erived purely from long-term memory, accuracy was better than chance for th e front (64%) and side (63%) of the body and also for the front (55%) and s ide (68%) of the familiar nonbody object. This suggests that mental images containing depth and spatial information may be generated from information held in long-term memory. Pictorial exposure to views of the front or side of the objects was used to investigate the representations from which this 3-dimensional shape and size information is derived. The results are discus sed in terms of three possible representational formats and argue that a fr om a front-view 21/2-dimensional representation mediates the transfer of in formation From long-term memory when depth information about the body is re quired.