Abstract
IntroductionTypically, humans place themselves at a preferred distance from others. This distance is known to characterize human spatial behavior. Here, we focused on neurocognitive conditions that may affect interpersonal distances. The current study investigated whether neurocognitive deficiencies in numerical and spatial knowledge may affect social perception and modulate personal space.MethodIn an event‐related potential (ERP) study, university students with developmental dyscalculia (DD) and typically developing control participants were given a computerized version of the comfortable interpersonal distance task, in which participants were instructed to press the spacebar when they began to feel uncomfortable by the approach of a virtual protagonist.ResultsResults showed that students with deficiencies in numerical and spatial skills (i.e., DD) demonstrated reduced variability in their preferred distance from an approaching friend. Importantly, DD showed decreased amplitude of the N1 wave in the friend condition.ConclusionThese results suggest that people coping with deficiencies in spatial cognition have a less efficient allocation of spatial attention in the service of processing personal distances. Accordingly, the study highlights the fundamental role of spatial neurocognition in organizing social space.
Highlights
Humans place themselves at a preferred distance from others
We aimed to discover whether, due to their numerical deficiencies, young high functioning university students diagnosed with developmental dyscalculia (DD) are deficient in their ability to spatially attend to their personal space and, struggle to regulate their preferred interpersonal distance from friends or strangers
Post hoc tests revealed that the source of the interaction was a significant difference in amplitude between the control group and DD group in the friend condition [F (1, 21) = 10.32, p < .01, η2 = 0.33], as the DD group showed a significantly less negative peak (M = 0.843, The current study aimed to investigate the neurophysiological correlates of personal distance regulation among university students with DD during a computerized version of the comfortable interpersonal distance task (CID—Duke & Kiebach, 1974; Duke & Nowicki, 1972)
Summary
Humans place themselves at a preferred distance from others. This distance is known to characterize human spatial behavior. The current study investigated whether neurocognitive deficiencies in numerical and spatial knowledge may affect social perception and modulate personal space. | 2 of 13 on which numbers are represented in an analogical format, allowing for a proficient processing of numerical quantities (Newcombe, 2002) This assumes that numbers, as symbolic representations of magnitudes and distances, are mapped on a line and are neutrally involved with activation of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) (for review, see Kaufmann, Wood, Rubinsten, & Henik, 2011). The MNL is typically oriented in space from the left (low numbers) to the right (high numbers) (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993)
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