Congenital visual deprivation modulates the perception of own, but not others’ body size

Neuropsychological reports of phantom sensations in congenital limb aplasia have often been taken as evidence of the existence of an innate, ‘hard-wired’, representation of the body in the brain that does not need to be constructed from, or updated by, online afferent sensory inputs, including vision. However, when asked to draw the contour of their own body and of an ideal body (i.e. body with perfect proportions), congenitally, but not late blind individuals, exhibited a magnified representation of their own body, specifically of their hands, in comparison to sighted controls. This over-representation did not extend to their ideal body model. These findings show that the representation of the own body metric is shaped by early visual experience, and that seeing one’s own and other bodies early in development contributes to the construction of a unified internal model, in which ‘own’ and ‘other’ merge.