Mental space maps into the future

Abstract

It has been suggested that our mind anticipates the future to act in a goal-directed, event-oriented manner. Here we asked whether peripersonal hand space, that is, the space surrounding one’s hands, is dynamically and adaptively mapped into the future while planning and executing a goal-directed object manipulation. We thus combined the crossmodal congruency paradigm (CCP), which has been used to study selective interactions between vision and touch within peripersonal space, with an object manipulation task. We expected crossmodal interactions in anticipation of the upcoming, currently planned object grasp, which varied trial-by-trial depending on the object’s orientation. Our results confirm that visual distractors close to the future finger positions selectively influence vibrotactile perceptions. Moreover, vibrotactile stimulation influences gaze behavior in the light of the anticipated grasp. Both influences become apparent partly even before the hand starts to move, soon after visual target object onset. These results thus support theories of event encodings and anticipatory behavior, showing that peripersonal hand space is flexibly remapped onto a future, currently actively inferred hand position.