Effects of the perceived temporal distance of events on mental time travel and on its underlying brain circuits.

Mental Time Travel (MTT) allows us to remember past events and imagine future ones. According to previous literature, the Temporal Distance of events affects MTT: our ability to order events worsens for close, compared to far, events. However, those studies established distances a-priori, albeit the way we perceive events' temporal distance may subjectively differ from their objective distance.

Spatial attention modulation of the brain network involved in mental time travel.

Objectives: The ability to mental time travel (MTT) consists in moving along a cognitive and spatially oriented representation of time, that is, an ideal mental time line, where past and future events are, respectively, located on the left and on the right portion of such a line. A shift of spatial attention by prismatic adaptation (PA) influences this spatial coding of time, thus affecting MTT. Here, we investigated the neural correlates of such a spatial modulation on MTT in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging protocol.

Peripersonal and reaching space differ: Evidence from their spatial extent and multisensory facilitation pattern.

Peripersonal space (PPS) is a multisensory representation of the space near body parts facilitating interactions with the close environment. Studies on non-human and human primates agree in showing that PPS is a body part-centered representation that guides actions. Because of these characteristics, growing confusion surrounds peripersonal and arm-reaching space (ARS), that is the space one's arm can reach.

Me, you, and our object: Peripersonal space recruitment during executed and observed actions depends on object ownership.

Peripersonal space (PPS) is a spatial representation that codes objects close to one's own and to someone else's body in a multisensory-motor frame of reference to support appropriate motor behavior. Recent theories framed PPS beyond its original sensorimotor aspects and proposed to relate it to social aspects of the self. Here, we manipulated the ownership status of an object ("whose object this is") to test the sensitivity of PPS to such a pervasive aspect of society.

Action Planning Modulates Peripersonal Space.

Peripersonal space is a multisensory representation relying on the processing of tactile and visual stimuli presented on and close to different body parts. The most studied peripersonal space representation is perihand space (PHS), a highly plastic representation modulated following tool use and by the rapid approach of visual objects. Given these properties, PHS may serve different sensorimotor functions, including guidance of voluntary actions such as object grasping.

The asymmetrical effect of leftward and rightward prisms on intact visuospatial cognition.

Rightward prismatic adaptation (RPA) can reduce neglect symptoms in patients whereas adaptation to leftward deviating prisms (LPA) can induce neglect-like behavior in healthy subjects. One influential anatomo-functional model of prismatic adaptation (PA) postulates that it inhibits activity of the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) contralateral to the prismatic deviation. By hypo-activating the PPC and thus eventually acting on interhemispheric balance, both LPA and RPA could possibly affect visuospatial perception in healthy subjects, however, such behavioral modulation has seldom been reported after RPA.

Cooperative tool-use reveals peripersonal and interpersonal spaces are dissociable.

The space surrounding people is often termed Interpersonal (IPS) in social psychology and Peripersonal (PPS) in neuroscience. In the current debate about their origin, the prevalent opinion is they share common functional characteristics. Bucking the trend, here we report a dissociation between PPS, operationalized as reachable space, and IPS, operationalized as comfort space.

Disentangling Action from Social Space: Tool-Use Differently Shapes the Space around Us.

Converging evidence suggests close relationships between the action and social space representations. The concepts of peripersonal space, as defined by cognitive neuroscience, and interpersonal space, as defined by social psychology, refer to approximately the same spatial area surrounding our bodies. The aim of this study was thus to assess experimentally whether the peripersonal (PPS) and interpersonal space (IPS) represent a similar psychological entity.

Prismatic Adaptation Induces Plastic Changes onto Spatial and Temporal Domains in Near and Far Space.

A large literature has documented interactions between space and time suggesting that the two experiential domains may share a common format in a generalized magnitude system (ATOM theory). To further explore this hypothesis, here we measured the extent to which time and space are sensitive to the same sensorimotor plasticity processes, as induced by classical prismatic adaptation procedures (PA). We also exanimated whether spatial-attention shifts on time and space processing, produced through PA, extend to stimuli presented beyond the immediate near space.

Impaired reading not due to visual field loss in a patient with a right-hemipsheric lesion.

We describe a right-handed patient (M.B.), who developed left hemianopsia and a severe reading impairment after right occipital-parietal hemorrhage.