The classic distinction between the body schema and the body image received renewed
interest in cognitive psychology, in part because of the attempts by the leading psychologist
Charles Spence and his co-authors to synthesise a mounting body of research into the
multisensory nature and functional properties of the neural structures in primate cortex that
are sensitive and responsive to cross-modal stimuli generated from the body and objects
located close to the body, and the famous rubber hand illusion which purported to illustrate
how the perception and understanding of what counts as one’s body, i.e., our body image,
can be manipulated to include foreign, body-part-like, objects such as a rubber hand. This
approach was intended to settle age old questions about how the body schema – the system
sub-personal sensorimotor system that shapes, facilitates and regulates motor control – is
implemented in the brain and address historic confusions about how the body schema should
be understood as an explanatory concept, as well as the problems surrounding the body
schema and image distinction on the grounds of the persistent conflation between the two
concepts. However, after offering several proposals as to how the body schema should be
used to organise and interpret the empirical data, the distinction fell out of favour with
Spence and his colleagues on the grounds of the very problems they intended to resolve. The
proposed solution is an alternative theoretical framework that, I shall argue, never
materialised. Instead, the various definitions they disseminate, I will claim, simply serve to
further perpetuate the same problems and confusions about the body schema. Thus, the
current state of the literature on the body image and schema in cognitive psychology is in dire
need of a conceptual framework that would help us situate and interpret the important
empirical data. I propose that we revisit the philosophical debates that were inspired by the
philosopher Shaun Gallagher as part of his project to provide a conceptual analysis of the
body schema and image distinction and vindicate its status as an important explanatory
device for the explanatory ambitions of embodied cognition. Gallagher’s analysis opens up
important questions about how the sub-personal multisensory processes of the body schema
not only facilitate moment-by-moment motor behaviours, but how they shape and optimise
motor control across developmental timelines, as well the importance of the embodied
configuration of an agent and its particular eco-niche for shaping and facilitating its motor
behaviours. The second important argument of the thesis is that the response to Gallagher’s
analysis has simply served to suppress the line of research that Gallagher inspired because the
questions his analysis raises have been overshadowed by more general disputes between
Gallagher and his opponents about the shape an analysis of the body schema from the
perspective of embodied cognition should take. As such, potentially promising lines of
research in relation to the body schema have since dried up. As part of my attempt to make
progress on the issues that are laid out at the first and second stages of the thesis, the third
stage will involve an exploration into the seminal Bayesian approach to understanding cross-modal
cue optimisation as it applies to object perception (Banks & Ernst, 2002) and the
recent extension of this paradigm to the multimodal sensorimotor processes that underpin
motor behaviour in action-oriented cognitive science (e.g., Friston, 2010). The conclusion of
the thesis is that the move from an embodied to an action-oriented analysis of the body
schema, and the conceptual distinction of which it is part, provides us with the right kind of
theoretical resources to begin to pursue fruitful avenues of research that allow us to begin to
address the questions set out by Gallagher’s analysis whilst avoiding (some of) the pitfalls
that beset the embodied approach. In the final chapter I use this model of the body schema to
illustrate how it can provide the basis for working back up towards a comprehensive theory
of the body image and schema distinction, which I then bring to bear on current, as-yet-unaddressed,
issues in developmental psychology