Fossataro Carlotta, Galigani Mattia, Rossi Sebastiano Alice, Bruno Valentina, Ronga Irene, Garbarini Francesca
MANIBUS Lab, Psychology Department, University of Turin, Turin 10123, Italy.
Neuroscience Institute of Turin (NIT), Turin 10123, Italy.
iScience. 2022 Dec 26;26(1):105879. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105879. eCollection 2023 Jan 20.
Peripersonal space (PPS) is a highly plastic "invisible bubble" surrounding the body whose boundaries are mapped through multisensory integration. Yet, it is unclear how the spatial proximity to others alters PPS boundaries. Across five experiments (N = 80), by recording behavioral and electrophysiological responses to visuo-tactile stimuli, we demonstrate that the proximity to others induces plastic changes in the neural PPS representation. The spatial proximity to someone else's hand shrinks the portion of space within which multisensory responses occur, thus reducing the PPS boundaries. This suggests that PPS representation, built from bodily and multisensory signals, plastically adapts to the presence of conspecifics to define the self-other boundaries, so that what is usually coded as "my space" is recoded as "your space". When the space is shared with conspecifics, it seems adaptive to move the other-space away from the self-space to discriminate whether external events pertain to the self-body or to other-bodies.
个人周边空间（PPS）是围绕身体的一个高度可塑性的“无形气泡”，其边界通过多感官整合进行映射。然而，尚不清楚与他人的空间接近度如何改变PPS边界。在五个实验（N = 80）中，通过记录对视觉触觉刺激的行为和电生理反应，我们证明与他人的接近会在神经PPS表征中引起可塑性变化。与他人手部的空间接近会缩小多感官反应发生的空间范围，从而缩小PPS边界。这表明，由身体和多感官信号构建的PPS表征会根据同种个体的存在进行可塑性调整，以界定自我与他人的边界，从而将通常编码为“我的空间”重新编码为“你的空间”。当空间由同种个体共享时，将他人空间与自我空间区分开，似乎有利于辨别外部事件是与自身身体还是与其他身体相关。
