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.
Highlights
For any living organism, it is important to monitor the space surrounding the body in order to avoid stimuli that have the potential to inflict damage on the body
In the present studies we investigated, in humans, how the perception of the visuospatial environment can be impacted by bodily sensations, especially when these sensations are conveyed through the nociceptive system, that is, the neural system coding and transmitting sensory information about potentially harmful somatosensory events
This interval was chosen based on previous studies [46] in which we showed that a 200 ms interval was the most efficient, as compared to 400 and 600 ms, for the nociceptive cue to impact the processing of the visual targets in the temporal order judgement (TOJ) task
Summary
It is important to monitor the space surrounding the body in order to avoid stimuli that have the potential to inflict damage on the body. We hypothesized that applying a nociceptive stimulus would influence the perception of visual stimuli surrounding the body, that is, stimuli that might have an immediate impact on the body, in order to prioritize their processing over stimuli located at a farther distance To this aim, we used two TOJ tasks, similar to those used by De Paepe and colleagues [24, 27] but with pairs of visual stimuli, one stimulus presented in each side of space. We added a condition during which participants were asked to place their hands next to the visual stimuli that were presented farther away from the Shaping visual space perception through bodily sensations body This condition was aimed to disentangle whether nociceptive-visual interactions mainly rely on a spatial representation of the body as a whole or on a spatial representation restricted to the particular limb on which the nociceptive stimulus is applied. The results confirmed our hypotheses and strongly support the hypothesis that the perception of visual space, especially that of peripersonal space, can be shaped by nociceptive information
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