Development of body representations in humans and robots

In order to achieve a variety of goals, humans and animals seamlessly command their highly complex bodies in space and concurrently integrate multimodal sensory information. To support these capabilities, it seems that knowledge or representation of the body and the surrounding space is necessary. In this regard, a number of concepts like body schema and body image were proposed. However, a growing number of studies from psychology and the neurosciences suggests that body schema or image are in fact mere umbrella terms, encompassing a multitude of different body representations that may be partially overlapping, partially dissociable, and partially organized in a hierarchy. Yet, empirical knowledge regarding the workings of these representations of our bodies in the brain is fragmented and sometimes contradictory and a coherent understanding of the key mechanisms is missing. Furthermore, computational models are scarce and address at the most isolated subsystems.