Talk:Body schema

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Psychology or Biology

This article is currently nominated as Biology GA. I think it is rather a Psychology article. The only category association in the article now is to Cognition, clearly a Psychology subtopic. --Ettrig (talk) 11:23, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Not really that important where it is placed, however I am going to notify the psychology project.--Garrondo (talk) 19:10, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Body schema/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

This is a promising article applying scientific references to a fascinating topic. At the moment, it's quite short and needs to expand some points, especially for the benefit of complete newcomers. Further comments to come,

Reviewer: MartinPoulter (talk) 11:52, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Before I do a full review, I'd like these points to be addressed:

• The lede is very short. It's an opportunity to draw the reader in. The phrase "an important role" is vague: expand this to say that without a functioning body schema, everyday activities such as walking and tool use are impossible without constant conscious effort.
• fMRI: spell out the acronym and explain what this is. How does it show the different functions of different areas of the brain, i.e., what are subjects doing when their brains are being scanned?
• WP:MOS says not to include the article title in the headers, so Properties of body image -> Properties
• The famous Rubber Hand Illusion: readers will want a full paragraph explaining what this is.
• Some of the terminology is correct but too high-level for a general audience: "deconvolve" ("separate"?) "parietal lesions" ("damage to the parietal lobes of the brain"?) "proprioceptive" (right to mention it but needs a sentence or clause of explanation).
• Caption of the Henry Head picture: can this be a sentence about Head's contribution to the field?
• There should be at least some mention of the somatosensory and motor homunculi, if only to distinguish them from body schema- does body schema have a distinct neural representation?
• It's good that the Properties section has an introductory sentence. The Associated disorders section could do with a similar introduction. Something like, "Disruptions of body image can result in three kinds of disorder..."

MartinPoulter (talk) 12:12, 5 January 2011 (UTC) A few more points:

• According to WP:LEAD, terminological issues have to be sorted out in the lead. Someone who's come to the article expecting to learn about body image should learn early on that they're in the wrong place. Perhaps once body schema has been introduced, the next sentence could be "It differs from body image, which is how people see their body when they picture it in their minds." Alternatively, have a sentence in the lead that goes "whereas body image... , body schema...". It doesn't seem necessary to have a whole section of the article about the confusion. The information that "body schema" used to be synonymous with "body image" is possibly of interest, but maybe as a footnote rather than the main content.
• The Properties section is a series of very short paragraphs. Most of it is explanation of one source. It either needs to be condensed into prose (with the technical terms marked in italics) or the individual paragraphs need to be longer. If the technical language is spelled out as suggested above, maybe that will fix the problem.
• Language again: "the visual and somatosensory receptive fields of parietal bimodal neurons" is clear to someone who knows the topic, but not suitable for a lay audience. It needs to be spelled out (and tell us how it was established that the receptive fields alter, and what exactly they alter in response to).

MartinPoulter (talk) 11:19, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks a lot to Martin for an extensive and reasonable review. I think that the points he makes have to be taken care of before this article can go GA, and I would like to add a few aspects I consider of central interest:

• The lede should explicate what 'body image' actually is (e.g., a mental model? how is it implemented? …), what's it relevant for (e.g. experience of (relation to) things in space, multisensory integration, imitation learning …?), and who uses the term (neuroscience, cognitive neuropsychology, psychology, cognitive science …?).
• In the section on history, Holmes should be mentioned just equally as an author of the 1911 article. What is more, in that paper there is no verbatim ocurrence of "body schema", the closest is "postural schemata" (p.188), this should clearly be reflected.
• Since "body schema" plays a rather prominent role for the schema concept in general (as in "schema theory"), references to the latter should be included.
• Altogether, the account of the current use of the term should be systematically and historically contextualised.
• Citations should refer to page numbers, not just to whole texts.

Helpful literature:

• Arbib, Michael A. (1996): Schema Theory: From Kant to McColloch and Beyond. In: R. Moreno-Diaz/J. Mira-Mira (Eds.), Brain Processes, Theories and Models: An International Conference in Honor of W. S. McCulloch 25 Years after His Death, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 11–23.
• Arbib, Michael A. (1987): Schemas. In: R.L. Gregory (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind, New York: Oxford University Press.

Morton Shumway—talk 16:31, 7 January 2011 (UTC).

Thanks for this, Morton: really useful. This reinforces my doubts about whether this article is really complete enough for GA. MartinPoulter (talk) 14:47, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

How about a little something about peripersonal space too? Fainites ^barleyscribs 21:32, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your improvements! MartinPoulter (talk) 14:47, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully I can do a bit more but I've been sidetracked by Chetniks! Fainites ^barleyscribs 15:41, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

The proposer has not made any edits on Wikipedia since just after nominating the article, six weeks ago. The article is a long way off GA standard and I see no evidence it's going to be substantially improved in the near future (though thanks again to Fainites). Hence I'm going to fail it for now. I hope the nominator can return to the article and take it to GA in the future. MartinPoulter (talk) 11:16, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't know who proposed this, but I was watching this page and wish I had seen the talk about it over a year ago! I would've fixed it then. Argh.Jconn3 (talk) 18:40, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Why not just nominate it again? MartinPoulter (talk) 21:43, 24 October 2012 (UTC)