Does physical weight alter the mental representation of the body? Evidence from motor imagery in obesity.

Obesity is a clinical condition that impacts severely the physical body. However, evidence related to the mental representation of the body in action is scarce. The few available studies only focus on avoiding obstacles, rather than participants imagining their own body. To advance knowledge in this field, we assessed the performance of 22 individuals with obesity compared with 30 individuals with a healthy weight in two tasks that implied different motor (more implicit vs. more explicit) imagery strategies. Two tasks were also administered to control for visual imagery skills, to rule out confounding factors. Moreover, we measured body uneasiness, through a standard questionnaire, as body image negativity could impact on other body representation components. Our findings do not show differences in the motor imagery tasks between individuals with obesity and individuals with healthy weight. On the other hand, some differences emerge in visual imagery skills. Crucially, individuals with obesity did report a higher level of body uneasiness. Despite a negative body image and visual imagery differences, obesity per se does not impact on the representation of the body in action. Importantly, this result is independent from the level of awareness required to access the mental representation of the body.

Performance at the clock drawing test of individuals affected by Parkinson's disease and healthy subjects: a retrospective study.

Clock drawing test (CDT) is a screening tool used in neuropsychological assessment for evaluating comprehensively multiple cognitive functions. Aberrant performance at CDT was observed in Parkinson's disease, due to impaired executive functioning as well as visuospatial difficulties. However, previous studies suffered from different limitations, such as reduced sample size as well as no comparison with healthy individuals. This retrospective study aimed to verify CDT accuracy in discriminating between 240 patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease and 205 healthy subjects. We verified CDT accuracy in discriminating patients when classified according to their global cognitive functioning measured through the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Frontal Assessment Battery. Our results showed that affected individuals reported a worse performance in CDT than healthy controls. Instead, no difference was found between patients when categorized according to their performance at the Mini-Mental State Examination or Frontal Assessment Battery. We confirmed that patients with Parkinson's disease reported low performance at the CDT. We encouraged the use of CDT for early detection of possible cognitive difficulties in Parkinson's disease for clinical and research purposes.