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Protracted Childhood Development of Structural Body Representations [dataset] Open Access

Representing the structure of one’s own body is a critical foundation of daily life as an embodied functional agent. The Body Image Task (Caggiano & Cocchini, 2020) has revealed that such representations can be systematically inaccurate or uncertain in adults. Across two experiments, the present study extends this work to 5–10-year-old children, whose bodies are continuously changing in dimension. Participants imagined their own body standing in front of them and pointed with a laser to 17 named body-part locations. The resulting implicit body maps were compared against maps of participants’ actual bodies. Using the same procedure, we also assessed visuospatial estimation accuracy for non-body tasks (pointing to a familiar sized object and a visible target). Both children and adults consistently overestimated hip and shoulder width, with children showing greater overestimation than adults for these dimensions as well as for torso height. Children’s accuracy was also more variable than adults: between body-parts within individual children, and across the whole body between different children. Only shoulder-width error decreased with age between 5-10 years, suggesting protracted development for most other body representations. Although children were less accurate on the non-body visuospatial tasks, neither non-body metric was meaningfully related to body-pointing error at any age. These findings make a substantial contribution to the limited literature on children’s structural representations of their own bodies, demonstrating significant mis-estimation on these static localisation tasks. We discuss these results in relation to action and motor skills; and highlight the important role of individual variability in cognitive-motor development.

Descriptions

Resource type

Dataset

Contributors

Creator: Sill, Oscar ¹
Kentridge, Robert ¹
Cowie, Dorothy ¹

¹ Durham University, UK

Funder

Durham University
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

Research methods

3D Motion Capture

Other description

Keyword

Body representation
Development

Subject

Child development
Psychology

Location

Language

English

Cited in

Identifier

ark:/32150/r2cn69m421z
doi:10.15128/r2cn69m421z

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY)

Publisher

Durham University

Date Created

File Details

Depositor

O.J.G. Sill

Date Uploaded

27 July 2026, 09:07:47

Date Modified

17 August 2026, 11:08:52

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Related Files

FINAL_ALLConds_ALL_processedData_StudyTwo.csv

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Mime type: application/zip

File size: 57379

Last modified: 2026:08:17 11:37:55+01:00

Filename: OscarSill--ResearchData.zip

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