Wednesday 22 July 08:15 - 09:45

Hall: 17 - Room 14 SA

Chair and Presenter: Gyselinck Valérie

Division: Division 14: Applied Cognitive Psychology

This symposium brings together leading researchers to discuss how humans perceive, represent, and adapt spatial boundaries across peripersonal, extrapersonal, and social contexts. By integrating perspectives from multisensory integration, motor control, memory, and navigation, the session highlights how space is not merely a physical dimension but a dynamic interface structuring both action and interaction.
Laurie Geers will present experimental evidence disentangling multisensory facilitation in peripersonal space from more general alertness effects, showing how looming stimuli differentially influence tactile versus auditory and visual detection. It challenges traditional assumptions about multisensory integration and point to new directions in clinical applications.
Yann Coello will extend this perspective by framing peripersonal space as a flexible interface between goal-directed action and social interaction. He will propose a model linking bodily space representation to social distance regulation, with implications for understanding atypical social processing in neuropathological populations.
Elena Gherri will examine how covert motor preparation, specifically lower-limb movements, influences spatial attention. Using ERP methods, she shows that preparing foot movements induces systematic attentional shifts toward effector and goal locations, revealing a close link between motor planning, spatial attention, and peripersonal space representation.
Valérie Gyselinck will explore how motor constraints shape spatial representations in memory, moving from reachable to navigable spaces. Her work highlights the differential contributions of upper- and lower-limb sensorimotor information in forming distance representations critical for environmental exploration and navigation.
Finally, Chiara Meneghetti will present evidence on individual differences in learning and navigating environments, focusing on the interplay of age, gender, cognitive abilities, and wayfinding preferences. These findings emphasize how navigation strategies and attitudes shape spatial learning in both real and virtual contexts.
Together, these contributions advance a unified perspective on how spatial representations bridge action and interaction. They underline the applied relevance of spatial cognition research for clinical assessment, rehabilitation, and urban design.