Changes of body schema in middle childhood

The main aim of our work is to provide updated norms for the Body Schema Test of Daurat-Hmeljak, Stambak and Bergès (1978) in children 6 to 11 years old, after three decades from his previous Italian standardization (Lis and Tallandini, 1981). Besides its Piagetian origin, this test is used in clinical practice, both in the pathology of body schema development and in traumatic pathology of adults. The variance analysis yielded main effects of gender, age and tasks, as well as an interaction between age and tasks. These data confirm that the body schema is a mental representation tied hand in glove with those aspects of cognitive development that are typical of middle childhood. Compared with the normative data provided by Lis and Tallandini (1981) our sample reached higher scores in all the test tasks. The better performance of the girls in our sample could be explained by the higher interest of women for the body features; the similarity of the tasks with puzzles or other ordering plays could also have motivated them more than boys.