Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Mara Floris on her recent paper " “I’m Not Hungry:” Bodily Representations and Bodily Experiences in Anorexia Nervosa " ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2024). Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by an intense fear of gaining weight, leading to extreme food restriction and a distorted perception of one’s own body. In our paper, we explore how individuals with AN experience significant alterations in two primary domains: bodily representations and bodily experiences. Mara Floris Bodily Representations and Perceptual Distortions Bodily representations refer to the cognitive and perceptual processes that help us perceive and understand our body’s size, shape, and function. In individuals with AN, these representations are often distorted, leading to body image disturbances. These disturbances manifest as an overestimation of body size—patients with AN often perceive themselves as larger than they are. This mispercept...

Stephen Gadsby  is a PhD candidate in the  Cognition and Philosophy lab , Monash University. His research spans a number of topics, including anorexia nervosa, body representation, delusions, psychiatric taxonomy, mental representation and predictive processing. In this post, he summarises his  new paper  "Self-Deception and the Second Factor: How Desire Causes Delusion in Anorexia Nervosa" recently published in Erkenntnis. Research shows that anorexia patients don’t hold extreme body ideals, despite common misconception. Indeed, most patients are thinner than what they judge their ideal size to be. In this paper , I advance a two-factor explanation for why patients believe they haven’t yet reached their ideal size. This account attempts to answer two questions: how the content of this belief arises and why the belief is maintained in the face of contradictory evidence. Following from previous work (Gadsby 2017a ; 2017b ), I answer the first of these question ...