Where am I? In terms of my physical and of my perceived body

We investigated the following three questions: 1) Where do people locate themselves on their body? 2) How precisely can people locate their body parts? and 3) Do people locate themselves differently in terms of their perceived compared to their physical body dimensions? Alsmith and Longo (2014) asked participants to point directly to themselves with a physical pointer. They found pointing to be to two distinct locations, upper face and upper torso. To investigate the robustness of their findings, we used virtual reality (VR), because this allows for systematic control over experimental variables and easy manipulation of visual information. In a VR headset and on a large-scale immersive display, participants rotated a pointer in their sagittal plane instructed to "Point directly to you", but also to nine of their body parts (feet, knees, hips, waist, shoulders, chin, nose, eyes and top of the head) previously measured for their physical heights. From the pointed-to body parts a perceived body was constructed, to which the self-locations were alternatively scaled/normalized. Pointing to self relative to the physical body was frequently found for all body regions above mid-torso, as well as above the head (Supplement, left graph). Participants pointed precisely to many body parts, but not to feet and knees, nor to the top of the head. Relative to the perceived body, pointing to self resembled more the results from the earlier physical setup, that is participants pointed mainly to upper torso and the face (Supplement, right graph). These results suggest, that a) people do not have one specific location where they locate themselves, and b) people do not accurately point to their entire body in the vertical plane