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Related Experiment Video

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Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
08:25

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Published on: October 19, 2014

Embodied perception of reachable space: how do we manage threatening objects?

Yann Coello1, Jeremy Bourgeois, Tina Iachini

  • 1Research Unit on Cognitive and Affective Sciences, University of Lille Nord de France, Lille, France. yann.coello@univ-lille3.fr

Cognitive Processing
|July 19, 2012
PubMed
Summary

The size of reachable space shrinks when dangerous objects face you, regardless of their perceived danger level. This indicates immediate body-object interaction, not just learned knowledge, shapes our personal space boundaries.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human Perception

Background:

  • The peripersonal space, or reachable space, is a critical sensory-motor interface.
  • Understanding factors influencing peripersonal space boundaries is key to comprehending spatial cognition and threat detection.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the perceived danger of everyday objects influences the size of reachable space.
  • To differentiate between long-term semantic knowledge of danger and on-line body-object interactions in shaping peripersonal space.

Main Methods:

  • Experimental manipulation of object danger (dangerous vs. non-dangerous) and orientation (towards vs. away from the perceiver).
  • Measurement of peripersonal space extent using reachability judgments.
  • Estimation of perceived object danger via questionnaires.

Main Results:

  • Peripersonal space was significantly reduced when dangerous objects were oriented towards participants.
  • This effect occurred irrespective of the participants' general estimation of the object's danger level.
  • Object orientation away from the participant did not alter peripersonal space size.

Conclusions:

  • The immediate, dynamic interaction between the body and object attributes is crucial for defining peripersonal space boundaries.
  • On-line processing of threat-related visual information, specifically object orientation, dynamically modulates reachable space.
  • Learned knowledge of an object's dangerousness alone does not appear to be the primary driver for peripersonal space modulation.