Dynamic expansion of alert responses to incoming painful stimuli following tool use

Rossetti, Angela; Romano, Daniele; Bolognini, Nadia; Maravita, Angelo

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.01.019

Cited by 42 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…From a theoretical perspective, this shows that the motor nature of space perception plays a crucial role in complex social processing, as peripersonal space encoding represents a key element in the regulation of distances in social interaction situations. This is in agreement with the view that peripersonal space is not only a space for interacting with objects, but also a safety space (Coello, Bourgeois, & Iachini, 2012;Lockard et al, 1977;Szpak et al, 2015;Rossetti et al, 2015), linked with our private area in social contexts (Iachini et al, 2014). The findings are thus in agreement with the embodied approach to perception and cognition (Barsalou, 1999(Barsalou, , 2008, suggesting that bodily states and simulation of information in the brain's modality-specific systems for perception and action represent also the basis of social interactions.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Altogether, these data corroborated the view that perceiving reachable objects involves the motor system (Proverbio, 2012), but depending on their location in peripersonal space (Quinlan & Culham, 2007). Numerous studies have emphasized that peripersonal space is also a safety space (Coello, Bourgeois, & Iachini, 2012;Lockard et al, 1977;Szpak et al, 2015;Rossetti et al, 2015), linked with our private area in social contexts (Iachini, Coello, Frassinetti, & Ruggiero, 2014). In this regard, Hall (1966) and later Hayduk (1978) were the first to suggest that social interactions require accurate control of interpersonal distances.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…Vertical bars indicate standard errors. Asterisk indicates significant difference Psychological Research in a social context, a safety space where intrusion by conspecifics is avoided Rossetti et al, 2015;Szpak et al, 2015). Indeed, the minimum interpersonal distance perceived as comfortable was broader when the PLW trajectory implied crossing than not crossing the mid-sagittal plane of the participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Keeping you at arm’s length: modifying peripersonal space influences interpersonal distance

Quesque

Ruggiero

Mouta

et al. 2016

Psychological Research

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Peripersonal space represents the area around the body where objects are coded in motor terms for the purpose of voluntary goal-directed actions. Previous studies have suggested that peripersonal space is also a safe space linked with our private area, influencing interpersonal space in social contexts. However, whether these two spaces rely on similar embodied processes remains an open issue. In the present study, participants observed a point-light walker (PLW) approaching them from different directions and passing near them at different distances from their right or left shoulder. While approaching, the PLW disappeared at a distance of 2 m and the task for the participants was to estimate if the interpersonal distance, at the time the PLW would have reached their level, was comfortable or not. Between two sessions of comfort judgments, the participants manipulated a 70 cm tool entailing an extension of peripersonal space, or a 10 cm tool entailing no extension of peripersonal space. The results revealed that the comfortable interpersonal distance was larger when the PLW crossed the mid-sagittal plane of the participants than when it approached them laterally, with a concomitant increase of response time. After participants manipulated the long tool, comfortable interpersonal distance increased, but predominantly when the PLW trajectory implied crossing the participants' mid-sagittal plane. This effect was not observed when participants manipulated the short tool. Two control tasks showed that using the long tool modified the reachability (control 1), but not the time to passage (control 2) estimates of PLW stimuli, suggesting that tool use extended peripersonal space without changing perceived visual distances. Overall, the data show that comfortable interpersonal distance is linked to the representation of peripersonal space. As a consequence, increasing peripersonal space through tool use has the immediate consequence that comfortable interpersonal distance from another person also increases, suggesting that interpersonal-comfort space and peripersonal-reaching space share a common motor nature.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Keeping you at arm’s length: modifying peripersonal space influences interpersonal distance

Quesque

Ruggiero

Mouta

et al. 2016

Psychological Research

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“…For instance, holding and using a tool to reach for objects extends the peripersonal space to involve the space around the tool (for a recent review, see Martel et al 2016). Rossetti et al (2015) reported that humans reacted with increased autonomic arousal when harmful objects appeared in the vicinity of the (actively used) tool, indicating that body's protective zone had enlarged to include the space around the tool. Similar effects result from inducing hand ownership illusion: threatening or injuring a self-attributed fake hand evokes autonomic and motor activation (Armel & Ramachandran 2003;Ehrsson, Wiech, Weiskopf, Dolan, & Passingham, 2007;Fusaro, Tieri, & Aglioti, 2016;González-Franco, Peck, Rodríguez-Fornells, & Slater, 2014;Lloyd, Morrison, & Roberts 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Riečanský

Lengersdorff

Pfabigan

et al. 2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Empathy for another person's pain and feeling pain oneself seem to be accompanied by similar or shared neural responses. Such shared responses could be achieved by mapping the bodily states of others onto our own bodily representations. We investigated whether sensorimotor neural responses to the pain of others are increased when experimentally reducing perceived bodily distinction between the self and the other. Healthy adult participants watched video clips of the hands of ethnic ingroup or outgroup members being painfully penetrated by a needle syringe or touched by a cotton swab. Manipulating the video presentation to create a visuospatial overlap between the observer's and the target's hand increased the perceived bodily self-attribution of the target's hand. For both ingroup and outgroup targets, this resulted in increased neural responses to the painful injections (compared with nonpainful contacts), as indexed by desynchronizations of central mu and beta scalp rhythms recorded using electroencephalography. Furthermore, these empathy-related neural activations were stronger in participants who reported stronger bodily self-attribution of the other person's hand. Our findings provide further evidence that empathy for pain engages sensorimotor resonance mechanisms. They also indicate that reducing bodily self-other distinction may increase such resonance for ingroup as well as outgroup targets.

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“…There are a few hints of a vertical asymmetry in the threat value assigned to environmental events. Vertical asymmetries in visual perception are well documented [5] and, as an example more directly related to threatening stimuli, larger sympathetic skin responses are elicited by a visual threat approaching vertically rather than horizontally [6].…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 98%

Gravitational cues modulate the shape of defensive peripersonal space

Bufacchi

Iannetti

2016

Current Biology

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SummaryThe potential damage caused by an environmental threat increases with proximity to the body, so animals perform more effective and stronger defensive responses when threatening stimuli occur nearby the body, in a region termed the defensive peripersonal space (DPPS) 1, 2. We recently characterized the fine-grained geometry of the face’s DPPS by recording the enhancement of the blink reflex elicited by electrical stimulation of the median nerve (hand-blink reflex, HBR), when the hand is closer to the face [3]. The resulting DPPS has the shape of a bubble, elongated asymmetrically along the rostro-caudal axis, extending further above eye-level [4]. We hypothesized that this vertical asymmetry is determined by gravitational cues: the probability that a threat will hit the body is higher when it comes from above. By systematically altering body posture, we show that the extent of DPPS asymmetry is defined in an earth-centred coordinate frame. This observation suggests the brain takes gravitational cues to automatically update threat value in an adaptive mechanism that accounts for the simple fact that objects fall down.

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Dynamic expansion of alert responses to incoming painful stimuli following tool use

Cited by 42 publications

References 73 publications

Keeping you at arm’s length: modifying peripersonal space influences interpersonal distance

Keeping you at arm’s length: modifying peripersonal space influences interpersonal distance

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Gravitational cues modulate the shape of defensive peripersonal space

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