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.