Shaping visual space perception through bodily sensations: Testing the impact of nociceptive stimuli on visual perception in peripersonal space with temporal order judgments

Abstract

Coordinating spatial perception between body space and its external surrounding space is essential to adapt behaviors to objects, especially when they are noxious. Such coherent multisensory representation of the body extended into external space is conceptualized by the notion of peripersonal reference frame, mapping the portion of space in which somatic and extra-somatic inputs interact closely. Studies on crossmodal interactions between nociception and vision have been scarce. Here we investigated how the perception of visual stimuli, especially those surrounding the body, can be impacted by a nociceptive and potentially harmful stimulus inflicted on a particular body part. In two temporal order judgment tasks, participants judged which of two lateralized visual stimuli, presented either near or far from the body, had been presented first. Visual stimuli were preceded by nociceptive stimuli, either applied unilaterally (on one single hand) or bilaterally (on both hands simultaneously). In Experiment 1 participants’ hands were always placed next to the visual stimuli presented near the trunk, while in Experiment 2 they could also be placed next to the visual stimuli presented far from the trunk. In Experiment 1, the presence of unilateral nociceptive stimuli prioritized the perception of visual stimuli presented in the same side of space as the stimulated hand, with a significantly larger effect when visual stimuli were presented near the body than when presented farther away. Experiment 2 showed that these visuospatial biases were related to the spatial congruency between the hand on which nociceptive stimuli were applied and the visual stimuli, independently of the relative distance of both the stimulated hand and the visual stimuli from the trunk. Indeed, nociceptive stimuli mostly impacted the perception of the closest visual stimuli. It is hypothesized that these crossmodal interactions may rely on representations of the space directly surrounding specific body parts.

Running virtual: The effect of virtual reality on exercise

“…Research has shown that although visual stimuli can affect body sensations, spatial stimuli can have a larger effect. The study found that when the visual stimuli was in closer proximity to the participant there was a higher bodily sensation (Filbrich et al, 2017).…”

Testing the exteroceptive function of nociception: the role of visual experience in shaping the spatial representations of nociceptive inputs

“…Spatiotopic mapping therefore offers a multimodal reference frame shared by the different sensory modalities. Nociceptive stimuli have been shown to interact with visual stimuli, especially with those occurring in the proximity of the limb on which the nociceptive stimuli are applied (De Paepe et al, 2015, 2017De Paepe et al, 2014;Filbrich, Alamia, Blandiaux, et al, 2017;Filbrich et al, 2018). Accordingly, nociceptive stimuli interact with extra-somatic stimuli in the peripersonal reference frame, a representation integrating spatial information from the body space and spatial information from the external space immediately surrounding the body (Vallar & Maravita, 2009).…”

No perceptual prioritization of non-nociceptive vibrotactile and visual stimuli presented on a sensitized body part

“…These biases can be generated by exogenous shifts of attention when lateralized non-target stimuli are presented shortly before the pair of target stimuli (e.g. 29 , 38 , 42 ), but also by endogenous shifts of attention when participants voluntary allocate spatial attention towards a location, either in response to a cue pointing in that direction or due to increased motivation to attend to the location (e.g. 13 , 39 – 42 ).…”

“…We included in our study two TOJ tasks on pairs of vibrotactile stimuli applied onto the sensitized and control arm, and on pairs of visual stimuli flashed on either arm. We used an adaptive TOJ task, which has the advantage of selecting the SOAs between the two stimuli on the basis of the performance of the participant (Bayesian approach), thereby allowing a smaller number of trials 28 , 29 without reducing the precision of the outcome (see 30 ). Participants’ performance was measured immediately before HFS (T0) and twice after HFS, at 20 (T1) and at 45 (T2) minutes after the end of sensitization, in line with the experimental design used in previous studies (e.g.…”