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

Abstract

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.

Perception of Peripersonal and Interpersonal Space in Patients with Restrictive‐type Anorexia

“…The fact that the PPS did not differ in AN and controls when interacting with objects suggests that it is not the motor component of PPS that is impaired in AN patients but its social component. Thus, although interpersonal distance is related to the representation of PPS (Quesque et al, ), it must be viewed as the physical space between people where social interactions occur on the basis of their emotional and motivational relevance (Lloyd, ), to which AN patients seem particularly sensitive.…”

“…PPS, initially defined as ‘action space’, contains the objects or individuals within reach and is processed differently from extrapersonal space where objects are only perceptually accessible (Coello & Delevoye‐Turrell, ; diPellegrino & Làdavas, ; Rizzolatti, Scandolara, Matelli, & Gentilucci, ). Furthermore, as a safe space, PPS specifies the individual's private area in social contexts (Holmes & Spence, ; Iachini, Coello, Frassinetti, & Ruggiero, ; Iachini et al, ; Quesque et al, ). PPS increases significantly in people with a high level of anxiety (Iachini, Pagliaro, & Ruggiero, ) or with phobias (Lourenco et al .…”

Physiological Response to Facial Expressions in Peripersonal Space Determines Interpersonal Distance in a Social Interaction Context

“…As a consequence, the peripersonal-safety space may influence the adjustment of interpersonal distances in social contexts ( Hall, 1969 ; Hayduk, 1978 ; Teneggi et al, 2013 ; Knapp et al, 2014 ), suggesting that social and action spaces share common mechanisms ( Iachini et al, 2014 ; Ruggiero et al, 2016 ). As evidence, Quesque et al (2017) revealed an increase of the minimum interpersonal comfort distance after using a long tool, a typical enlargement effect known for peripersonal space ( Bourgeois et al, 2014 ). This indicates that the representation of the peripersonal space constrains the spatial dimension of social interactions (but see, Patané et al, 2016 ).…”

Idiosyncratic representation of peripersonal space depends on the success of one's own motor actions, but also the successful actions of others!

“…Interestingly, peripersonal space seems also to serve as spatial reference independently of the presence of manipulable objects in the environment. As evidence, Quesque, Ruggiero, Mouta, Santos, Iachini and Coello [ 28 ] demonstrated that enlarging the peripersonal space by using tools increases the interpersonal crossing distance maintained during navigation. From this finding, Coello & Iachini [ 24 ] extended the concept of peripersonal space to embrace the fact that it not only contains the objects and hazards that the organism must consider when interacting with the surrounding environment, but it also specifies a safe and private area for interacting with conspecifics in social contexts (see also [ 10 , 29 – 30 ]).…”