The past decade has seen increasing interest within the cognitive neuroscience community in understanding the psychological processes involved in representing the body, and in learning how these processes may be implemented within the brain. This special issue of Cognitive Neuroscience contributes to the rapidly developing literature by presenting six empirical and two theoretical discussion papers and their commentaries. It provides a timely review of the current state-of-the-art on several of the most important topic areas in the body representation field.