1 Introduction It is well-known that common objects are mentally represented in some `canonical' or prototypical orientation at which objects are recognised most efficiently. The canonical orientation of visually represented body parts has previously been examined with cog- nitive psychological tasks that included both inversion (eg Bruce et al 1991; Diamond and Carey 1986; Freire et al 2000; Reed et al 2003; Rhodes 1988; Searcy and Bartlett 1996; Sergent 1984; Tanaka and Farah 1993; Yin 1969) and mental-rotation paradigms (eg Cooper and Shepard 1975; Parsons 1987a, 1987b). For instance, Yin (1979) demon- strated that humans can visually recognise faces better when they are upright than when they are inverted. This result has been interpreted as indicating that humans represent visual faces in a prototypical upright orientation. Cooper and Shepard (1975) presented participants with line drawings of hands at different orientations within a picture plane, and asked whether each drawing represented a right or left hand. The participants took increasingly longer to make their decision as the orientation of the presented hand deviated further from a position with fingers pointed upright. This result suggests that the upright orientation is `canonical' or prototypical for visual hand representation. Cooper and Shepard proposed that participants mentally moved one of their own hands to match that of the stimulus, and then compared the two. In other words, the canonical orientation was derived from a first-person perspective (Cooper and Shepard 1975; Parsons 1987b). Representing human hands haptically or visually from first-person versus third-person perspectives Perception, 2010, volume 39, pages 236 ^ 254 Ryo Kitada Division of Cerebral Integration, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, 444-8585, Japan; e-mail: kitada@nips.ac.jp H Chris Dijkerman Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, NL 3584 Utrecht, The Netherlands Grace Soo, Susan J Lederman Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada Received 30 July 2009, in revised form 7 December 2009; published online 10 February 2010 Abstract. Humans can recognise human body parts haptically as well as visually. We employed a mental-rotation task to determine whether participants could adopt a third-person perspective when judging the laterality of life-like human hands. Female participants adopted either a first- person or a third-person perspective using vision (experiment 1) or haptics (experiment 2), with hands presented at various orientations within a horizontal plane. In the first-person perspective task, most participants responded more slowly as hand orientation increasingly deviated from the participant's upright orientation, regardless of modality. In the visual third-person perspective task, most participants responded more slowly as hand orientation increasingly deviated from the experimenter's upright orientation; in contrast, less than half of the participants produced this same inverted U-shaped response-time function haptically. In experiment 3, participants were explicitly instructed to adopt a third-person perspective haptically by mentally rotating the rubber hand to the experimenter's upright orientation. Most participants produced an inverted U-shaped function. Collectively, these results suggest that humans can accurately assume a third-person perspective when hands are explored haptically or visually. With less explicit instructions, however, the canonical orientation for hand representation may be more strongly influenced haptically than visually by body-based heuristics, and less easily modified by perspective instructions. doi:10.1068/p6535