Social Context and Tool Use Can Modulate Interpersonal Comfort Space.

Recent research has investigated whether the representation of space around the body, in terms of reach-action (imagining of reaching another person) and comfort-social (tolerance of the other's proximity) spaces, may reflect a shared sensorimotor basis. Some studies exploiting motor plasticity induced by tool use have not observed sensorimotor identity (i.e.

Interaction with Virtual Humans and Effect of Emotional Expressions: Anger Matters!

Today we are experiencing a hybrid real-virtual society in which the interaction with virtual humans is normal and "quasi-social". Understanding the way we react to the interaction with virtual agents and the impact of emotions on social dynamics in the virtual world is fundamental. Therefore, in this study we investigated the implicit effect of emotional information by adopting a perceptual discrimination task.

The Role of Temporal Order in Egocentric and Allocentric Spatial Representations.

Several studies have shown that spatial information is encoded using two types of reference systems: egocentric (body-based) and/or allocentric (environment-based). However, most studies have been conducted in static situations, neglecting the fact that when we explore the environment, the objects closest to us are also those we encounter first, while those we encounter later are usually those closest to other environmental objects/elements. In this study, participants were shown with two stimuli on a computer screen, each depicting a different geometric object, placed at different distances from them and an external reference (i.

Defensive functions provoke similar psychophysiological reactions in reaching and comfort spaces.

The space around the body crucially serves a variety of functions, first and foremost, preserving one's own safety and avoiding injury. Recent research has shown that emotional information, in particular threatening facial expressions, affects the regulation of peripersonal-reaching space (PPS, for action with objects) and interpersonal-comfort space (IPS, for social interaction). Here we explored if emotional facial expressions may similarly or differently affect both spaces in terms of psychophysiological reactions (cardiac inter-beat intervals: IBIs, i.

Egocentric and allocentric spatial representations in a patient with Bálint-like syndrome: A single-case study.

Previous studies suggested that egocentric and allocentric spatial representations are supported by neural networks in the occipito-parietal (dorsal) and occipito-temporal (ventral) streams, respectively. The present study aimed to explore the integrity of ego- and allo-centric spatial representations in a patient (GP) who presented bilateral occipito-parietal damage consistent with the picture of a Bálint-like syndrome. GP and healthy controls were asked to provide memory-based spatial judgments on triads of objects after a short (1.