BRNet 2026: Poster and Panel at the Body Representation Network Meeting

Created 2026-06-18

Type communications-post

Status draft

Tags communicationsbrnetconferenceposterbody-representation

In June 2026, we attended the 8th Annual Body Representation Network Meeting in Padova, Italy, where Asia (Ksenia) Shcherbakova presented a poster and participated in a career panel for early-career researchers. The conference, themed “The Uncanny Body,” brought together neuroscientists, clinicians, and psychologists working on how the brain represents the body, what happens when that representation breaks down, and how to measure it.

The Poster

The poster was titled “Three Trainable Components of Body Representation: Evidence from a Decade of Naturalistic Perceptual Skills Training.”

The core argument: body representation isn’t something normally homogeneous that only breaks down in clinical populations. In healthy but untrained populations, certain aspects of it are systematically underdeveloped, in ways that only become visible when a training context demands exceed what’s available for representation. The poster proposes a framework of three mechanistically different trainable components of body representation with their unique measurable failure patterns and training strategies. The framework draws on data from approximately ten years of Baseworks practice with over 10,000 learners.

The three components

The framework identifies three separable body representation modalities/capacities relevant in the context of physical movement (both training and daily life):

Localized proprioceptive awareness (PRO). The ability to consciously detect spatially specific sensations arising from muscle. This capacity varies widely across individuals, even among people with extensive physical backgrounds. In our survey of non-practitioners, less than half reported awareness of muscular sensations at rest. Subjective vividness and pleasantness of these sensations also vary greatly.

Spatial awareness (SPA). The capacity to encode, hold, and reproduce the configuration of the body without relying on visual feedback. In one of our analyzed datasets, people with no prior Baseworks training showed errors eight to fifteen times larger than people trained in Baseworks on selected spatial configuration tasks. The selection of the tasks that reproducibly results in failures in a significant number of healthy individuals has been part of the Baseworks development via iterative refinement for communicability. Baseworks almost entirely consists of tasks that look simple but are surprisingly difficult to perform.

Interoceptive awareness (INT). Self-regulatory monitoring of breathing and load during practice. Even though at first glance, this is the most studied of the three in the scientific literature, our approach is quite distinct. The INT failures are inability to not control breathing and the inability to adjust the intensity of a movement task to avoid fatigue, pain, and DOMS. According to our observations on thousands of students who have had training experience in other training modalities, many people are unable to use interoceptive sensations as predictors of allostatic load. This ability improves with targeted training.

Each of the three components has an internal structure of 3 dimensions: D, A, and U. Discrimination (D, the ability to detect and distinguish patterns in sensory input in a particular modality ) supports appraisal (A, the attitude towards what you’re sensing - pleasant/unpleasant, beautiful, disturbing, etc) and use (U, the ability to integrate that sensory information into skilled movement or regulatory behavior). The analysis of own of our datasets shows that discrimination (D) appears to be a necessary condition for appraisal (A) and skilled use (U): training appraisal without first developing discrimination doesn’t produce discrimination, but developing discrimination does support gains in appraisal and use without explicitly training them.

The assessment gap

In the poster, we also presented our analysis where we mapped our 3 x 3 dimensions onto the four body awareness questionnaires in wide scientific use: the MAIA-2, the BAQ, the BPQ, and the IAS. Each item in all four tools was coded according to which component it addresses and which level of the D-A-U structure it measures.

The finding: proprioceptive awareness (PRO) and spatial awareness (SPA) are absent across all four tools. Existing assessments focus almost entirely on interoception, and within interoception they tend to conflate discrimination and appraisal/use - not a single item was assessing the discriminative capacity on its own.

This has practical consequences. Researchers designing studies that involve body representation in non-clinical populations, or evaluating movement-based training interventions, are working without instruments for two of the three components our framework identifies, and are insufficient to assess teh interoceptive domain at the grain of our framework. Notably, in our context, the assessment tools are movement tasks rather than text-based questionnaires, although we also use questionnaires and open-ended response to collect phenomenological accounts for broader analysis.

The Field at BRNet

The field of Body Representation research is fascinating and closely adjacent to our research and pedagogical applications. For example, any BR researcher would attest to the phenomenon of visual dominance - how much visual input supplements and often overpowers proprioceptive information, which is one of the problems we have to deal with in the classroom. Therefore, it was extremely interesting to get to look at the field from the inside and gain new perspective on what we do in Baseworks.

The Body Representation Network is primarily a clinical and neuroscience research community. Of roughly 20 presentations across two days, almost all addressed body representation distortion in psychiatric or neurological conditions. The program organized into five main areas:

Eating disorders and body image distortion, including anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder
Interoceptive alterations in schizophrenia spectrum conditions and autism
Body ownership and peripersonal space, studied through illusion paradigms including virtual reality and the rubber hand illusion
Proprioception and motor integration in neurological recovery (stroke, spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy)
Computational and predictive processing models of how the brain updates its body representation

Three keynote presentations on the program were: Jamie Feusner (University of Toronto) on computational and neural models of body image distortion in psychiatric disorders, Michela Bassolino (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) on tools and methods for assessing body representation in neurological conditions, and Olaf Blanke (EPFL) on the neuropsychiatry of “invisible presences” (the clinical phenomenon in which people sense a body near them that isn’t there), studied from a body schema and self-other distinction angle.

Asia’s poster was the only contribution working from a movement pedagogy and healthy populations angle. The Baseworks dataset is naturalistic: it comes from actual practice over a decade, organized around a single operational constraint (whether movement instructions reliably produce the intended movement across diverse learners). That made the position distinct in the room. Conversations around the poster were direct, particularly with researchers working on measurement tools and predictive processing models, where the operationalization of discrimination as a necessary condition for appraisal maps onto questions those researchers are already working with.

What the conference program illustrated clearly is that body representation research is predominantly organized around distortion and damage: what breaks, what goes wrong, what looks different in clinical populations. The research tradition studying what body representation looks like as it develops, refines, and becomes more precise through sustained practice in healthy populations is, at present, quite sparse. There’s no shortage of interest in the question (several conversations at the conference circled around exactly this), but there’s also very little data, partly because the contexts that produce that kind of development (sustained, structured movement training with an observational and pedagogical record) haven’t been studied from within. The field has extensive data on what body representation looks like when it fails. What’s largely absent is data on what it looks like when it develops deliberately, in a sustained practice context, over time.

The ECR Panel

On the second day, Asia participated in the early-career researcher panel, “Career Options and Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Considerations in Research.” The panel brought together early-career scientists to discuss career paths outside the conventional academic track.

Asia’s contribution described a category of research position she called the “residential scientist”: a researcher embedded inside a non-academic context, whose work is to study that context systematically from within it.

From the panel:

“I am being in a certain context which is understudied and I have to collect information about this, I have to identify the needs and I have to study it and communicate with other people. And I think contexts like this, they exist, and I think there’s probably plenty of them. The reason why many experiences are understudied is because there’s no residential scientist who would systematically make sense of them. And, for example, when I go to scientific conferences and I listen to presentations, there’s such a gap between what we need and what is actually being studied in the lab, in any field of science. So I feel like it’s really a requirement to somehow create this category of a residential scientist who gets shipped into a certain environment and brings back what’s actually happening there.”

On building the tools the work requires:

“A lot of my work is about developing assessment tools because existing assessment tools just don’t work for what we do.”

“Rather than taking an existing framework and just following it and adding more data to it, you have to build a new framework from scratch, which is very interesting, challenging, not very supportive.”

The residential scientist position connects directly to the poster’s findings. The assessment gap identified in the four questionnaires isn’t accidental. It reflects the fact that the tools were built from the inside of clinical and lab-paradigm research. Closing the gap requires someone who has spent enough time inside the practice context to know what needs measuring, and why what currently exists doesn’t capture it.

Research Worth Noting

Two presentations at the conference addressed adjacent territory.

Valeria C. Peviani (Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf) received the ECR Award for her work, “From Sensation to Structure: Inferring the Body in Space.” The framing, from distributed sensation to structured spatial representation, covers questions closely related to the SPA component and the D→A pathway.

Michel Akselrod (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) presented “Dynamic Integration of Body Representation and Proprioception During Stroke Recovery.” Proprioceptive discrimination is central to the PRO component, and Akselrod’s work on how proprioceptive signals integrate with body representation in a rehabilitation context addresses related questions from the clinical recovery side.

The poster draws on the same framework described in the baseworks.com article on proprioceptive awareness
Conference event page: [link to WP event ID 49121 when published]
Abstract: “Three Trainable Components of Body Representation: Evidence from a Decade of Naturalistic Perceptual Skills Training”

Draft Notes

Status: First draft, 2026-06-18. Awaiting:

Asia’s collaboration pass — her lecture notes and personal observations will significantly enrich the “Field at BRNet” and “Research Worth Noting” sections. The Vercelli and Saramandi talks in particular are worth adding once Asia’s notes are in.
asia-talking.MOV 02:26–05:08 — the transcript Whisper hallucinated Welsh in that section. Patrick to fill in from memory or note as unrecoverable before finalizing quote sections.
Featured photo selection — choose from CDN set at https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/ (filenames baseworks-brnet-2026-padova-109 through 153). Photo needs to be imported to WP media library to get an ID for the communication_image ACF field.
WP-CLI publish — see /write-communications-post skill for commands.

Approach: Option A+C hybrid, per Patrick’s direction. Anchored on the assessment gap (poster’s sharpest claim), with the ECR panel and residential scientist framing as a separate section at full weight.

Editorial Notes

Round 1 draft (2026-06-18): First draft generated by Claude Code (claude-sonnet-4-6) from: BRNet 2026 program booklet PDF (all 12 short talks + 8 poster abstracts), Asia’s submitted abstract, conference landscape doc, asia-talking.MOV transcript (clean portion 00:00–02:26), five lecture transcripts (Blanke good quality, Engel/Feusner/Saramandi partial/mixed, Vercelli poor), and 2026-06-brnet-session-context.md. Asia’s personal lecture notes and the 02:26–05:08 panel video segment are still outstanding and should be incorporated before publication.