A common representation of fingers and toes

TLDR: This work obtained confusion matrices showing the pattern of mislocalisation on the hairy skin surfaces of both the fingers and toes, which suggest that there is a common representation of the hands and toes.

About: This article is published in Acta Psychologica.The article was published on 2019-08-01 and is currently open access. It has received 8 citations till now.

Figures

Figure 2. Confusion matrices showing the proportion of stimuli judged as located on each of the five digits as a function of which digit was actually stimulated. Digits were identified by numbers one (the big toe/thumb) through five (the little toe/finger). Data from the foot is shown on the left panel, and data from the hand is shown in the right panel. The proportion of correct responses for each digit is shown along the diagonal from the top-left to the bottom-right. The off-diagonal cells represent mislocalisations between digits.

Figure 1. Experimental set-up. Participants sat in a chair with their left foot resting on a foot rest, and their left hand resting on a table. This posture gave the experimenter easy access to both the fingers and toes. Vision was prevented using a blindfold.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "A common representation of fingers and toes" ?

Manser-Smith et al. this paper found that the human hands and feet are serially homologous structures that have co-evolved, resulting in numerous similarities between the two body parts. 

Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "A common representation of fingers and toes" ?

To attempt to disentangle how the body representation itself and the body ’ s position in external space contribute to localisation biases, future experiments may focus on manipulating posture of the fingers and toes relative to one another, or relative to the gaze-direction, for example. From the results of this experiment and others the authors have suggested that patterns of tactile confusions may arise from high-level body representations, which likely originate in the posterior parietal cortex. Cortical somatotopy suggests manual dexterity is primitive and evolved independently of bipedalism.