Mutual gaze and movement synchrony boost observers' enjoyment and perception of togetherness when watching dance duets.

As social beings, we are adept at coordinating our body movements and gaze with others. Often, when coordinating with another person, we orient ourselves to face them, as mutual gaze provides valuable cues pertaining to attention and intentions. Moreover, movement synchrony and mutual gaze are associated with prosocial outcomes, yet the perceptual consequences of these forms of coordination remain poorly understood.

Mother knows best: Mothers are more egocentric towards their own child's bodily feelings.

Our emotional state can influence how we understand other people's emotions, leading to biases in social understanding. Yet emotional egocentric biases in specific relationships such as parent-child dyads, where not only understanding but also emotional and bodily regulation is key, remain relatively unexplored. To investigate these biases and control for sensory priors, we first conducted two experiments in dyads of adult strangers (total N=75) using a bodily Emotional Egocentricity Task that enables simultaneous affective tactile stimulation within a dyad.

Three key questions to move towards a theoretical framework of visuospatial perspective taking.

What would a theory of visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) look like? Here, ten researchers in the field, many with different theoretical viewpoints and empirical approaches, present their consensus on the three big questions we need to answer in order to bring this theory (or these theories) closer.

Interoceptive abilities facilitate taking another's spatial perspective.

Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which is central to effectively understanding and interacting with our environment and other people. Interoception, the sense of the physiological state of our body, is also a fundamental component contributing to our perception. However, whether the perception of our inner body signals influences our ability to adopt and flexibly change between different spatial perspectives remains poorly understood.

Spatial perspective-taking: insights from sensory impairments.

Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which is central to effectively understanding and interacting with our environment and other people. Sensory impairments such as blindness are known to impact spatial representations and perspective-taking is often thought of as a visual process. However, disturbed functioning of other sensory systems (e.

Social touch deprivation during COVID-19: effects on psychological wellbeing and craving interpersonal touch.

Social touch has positive effects on social affiliation and stress alleviation. However, its ubiquitous presence in human life does not allow the study of social touch deprivation 'in the wild'. Nevertheless, COVID-19-related restrictions such as social distancing allowed the systematic study of the degree to which social distancing affects tactile experiences and mental health.

Interactions between interoception and perspective-taking: Current state of research and future directions.

Interoception, the sense of the physiological state of the body, and perspective-taking, the ability to take another's point of view, are two fundamental components contributing to our perception and interaction with the external world. However, whether the perception of our inner body influences how we perceive the external world and other people remains poorly understood. Here, we review recent behavioural and neuroimaging evidence investigating the links between dimensions of interoception (i.

Updating beliefs beyond the here-and-now: the counter-factual self in anosognosia for hemiplegia.

The syndrome of anosognosia for hemiplegia, or the lack of awareness for one's paralysis following right hemisphere stroke, can provide unique insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of self-awareness. Yet it remains unclear whether anosognosia for hemiplegia is a modality-specific deficit of sensorimotor monitoring, or whether domain-general processes of attention and belief-updating converge to cause anosognosia for hemiplegia. Using a Bayesian learning framework, we formalized and empirically investigated the hypothesis that failures to update anosognosic beliefs can be explained by abnormalities in the relative uncertainty (i.

Exploring three levels of interoception in people with functional motor disorders.

Introduction: A three-level model of interoception has recently been defined. We aim to study the interoceptive processing in individuals with functional motor disorder (FMD).

Methods: Twenty-two patients with FMD were compared to 23 healthy controls.

Dissociating embodiment and emotional reactivity in motor responses to artworks.

Perceiving art is known to elicit motor cortex activation in an observer's brain. This motor activation has often been attributed to a covert approach response associated with the emotional valence of an art piece (emotional reaction hypothesis). However, recent accounts have proposed that aesthetic experiences could be grounded in the motor simulation of actions required to produce an art piece and of the sensorimotor states embedded in its subject (embodied aesthetic hypothesis).

Mixing up the Senses: Sensory Substitution Is Not a Form of Artificially Induced Synaesthesia.

Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) are typically used to restore functionality of a sensory modality that has been lost, like vision for the blind, by recruiting another sensory modality such as touch or audition. Sensory substitution has given rise to many debates in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy regarding the nature of experience when using SSDs. Questions first arose as to whether the experience of sensory substitution is represented by the substituted information, the substituting information, or a multisensory combination of the two.

Vision shapes tactile spatial perspective taking.

Information from the environment can be perceived according to ego-centered or decentered spatial perspectives. Different spatial perspectives can be adopted when perceiving not only visual but also auditory or tactile information. Because vision may be dominant in setting up spatial information processing, visual loss might affect perspective taking in other sensory modalities.

Harnessing tactile waves to measure skin-to-skin interactions.

Skin-to-skin touch is an essential form of tactile interaction, yet there is no known method to quantify how we touch our own skin or someone else's skin. Skin-to-skin touch is particularly challenging to measure objectively, since interposing an instrumented sheet, no matter how thin and flexible, between the interacting skins is not an option. To fill this gap, we explored a technique that takes advantage of the propagation of vibrations from the locus of touch to pick up a signal that contains information about skin-to-skin tactile interactions.

Welcoming back my arm: affective touch increases body ownership following right-hemisphere stroke.

Right-hemisphere stroke can impair the ability to recognize one's contralesional body parts as belonging to one's self. The study of this so-called 'disturbed sense of limb ownership' can provide unique insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of body ownership. In this study, we address a hypothesis built upon experimental studies on body ownership in healthy volunteers.

Damage to the right insula disrupts the perception of affective touch.

Specific, peripheral C-tactile afferents contribute to the perception of tactile pleasure, but the brain areas involved in their processing remain debated. We report the first human lesion study on the perception of C-tactile touch in right hemisphere stroke patients (N = 59), revealing that right posterior and anterior insula lesions reduce tactile, contralateral and ipsilateral pleasantness sensitivity, respectively. These findings corroborate previous imaging studies regarding the role of the posterior insula in the perception of affective touch.

Vestibular modulation of multisensory integration during actual and vicarious tactile stimulation.

The vestibular system has been shown to contribute to multisensory integration by balancing conflictual sensory information. It remains unclear whether such modulation of exteroceptive (e.g.

Affective certainty and congruency of touch modulate the experience of the rubber hand illusion.

Our sense of body ownership relies on integrating different sensations according to their temporal and spatial congruency. Nevertheless, there is ongoing controversy about the role of affective congruency during multisensory integration, i.e.

Dance Training Shapes Action Perception and Its Neural Implementation within the Young and Older Adult Brain.

How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural responses among a dance-naïve sample of 20 young and 19 older adults.

Balancing body ownership: Visual capture of proprioception and affectivity during vestibular stimulation.

The experience of our body as our own (i.e. body ownership) involves integrating different sensory signals according to their contextual relevance (i.

The influence of sensorimotor experience on the aesthetic evaluation of dance across the life span.

Understanding how action perception, embodiment, and emotion interact is essential for advancing knowledge about how we perceive and interact with each other in a social world. One tool that has proved particularly useful in the past decade for exploring the relationship between perception, action, and affect is dance. Dance is, in its essence, a rich and multisensory art form that can be used to help answer not only basic questions about social cognition but also questions concerning how aging shapes the relationship between action perception, and the role played by affect, emotion, and aesthetics in social perception.

Neurodevelopmental perspectives on dance learning: Insights from early adolescence and young adulthood.

Studies investigating human motor learning and movement perception have shown that similar sensorimotor brain regions are engaged when we observe or perform action sequences. However, the way these networks enable translation of complex observed actions into motor commands-such as in the context of dance-remains poorly understood. Emerging evidence suggests that the ability to encode specific visuospatial and kinematic movement properties encountered via different routes of sensorimotor experience may be an integral component of action learning throughout development.

The soothing function of touch: affective touch reduces feelings of social exclusion.

The mammalian need for social proximity, attachment and belonging may have an adaptive and evolutionary value in terms of survival and reproductive success. Consequently, ostracism may induce strong negative feelings of social exclusion. Recent studies suggest that slow, affective touch, which is mediated by a separate, specific C tactile neurophysiological system than faster, neutral touch, modulates the perception of physical pain.

Reading the mind in the touch: Neurophysiological specificity in the communication of emotions by touch.

Touch is central to interpersonal interactions. Touch conveys specific emotions about the touch provider, but it is not clear whether this is a purely socially learned function or whether it has neurophysiological specificity. In two experiments with healthy participants (N = 76 and 61) and one neuropsychological single case study, we investigated whether a type of touch characterised by peripheral and central neurophysiological specificity, namely the C tactile (CT) system, can communicate specific emotions and mental states.

The Impact of Experience on Affective Responses during Action Observation.

Perceiving others in action elicits affective and aesthetic responses in observers. The present study investigates the extent to which these responses relate to an observer's general experience with observed movements. Facial electromyographic (EMG) responses were recorded in experienced dancers and non-dancers as they watched short videos of movements performed by professional ballet dancers.

Shaping and reshaping the aesthetic brain: Emerging perspectives on the neurobiology of embodied aesthetics.

Less than two decades after its inception, the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics continues to grow in interest and momentum. Despite the biological and social importance of the human body and the attention people pay to its appearance in daily life, only recently has neuroaesthetic inquiry turned its attention to questions concerning the aesthetic appraisal of the human body. We review evidence illustrating that the complexity of aesthetic experience is reflected by dynamic interplay between brain systems involved in reward, perceptual and motor processing, with a focus on aesthetic perception involving the human body.