Adopting the perspective of another person is an important aspect of social cognition and has been shown to depend on multisensory signals from one’s own body. Recent work suggests that interoceptive signals not only contribute to own-body perception and self-consciousness, but also to empathy. Here we investigated if social cognition – in particular adopting the perspective of another person – can be altered by a systematic manipulation of interoceptive cues and further, if this effect depends on empathic ability. The own-body transformation task (OBT) – wherein participants are instructed to imagine taking the perspective and position of a virtual body presented on a computer screen – offers an effective way to measure reaction time differences linked to the mental effort of taking an other’s perspective. Here, we adapted the OBT with the flashing of a silhouette surrounding the virtual body, either synchronously or asynchronously with the timing of participants’ heartbeats. We evaluated the impact of this cardio-visual synchrony on reaction times and accuracy rates in the OBT. Empathy was assessed with the empathy quotient (EQ) questionnaire. Based on previous work using the cardio-visual paradigm, we predicted that synchronous (vs. asynchronous) cardio-visual stimulation would increase self-identification with the virtual body and facilitate participants’ ability to adopt the virtual body’s perspective, thereby enhancing performance on the task, particularly in participants with higher empathy scores. We report that participants with high empathy showed significantly better performance during the OBT task during synchronous versus asynchronous cardio-visual stimulation. Moreover, we found a significant positive correlation between empathic ability and the synchrony effect (the difference in reaction times between the asynchronous and synchronous conditions). We conclude that synchronous cardio-visual stimulation between the participant’s body and a virtual body during an OBT task makes it easier to adopt the virtual body’s perspective, presumably based on multisensory integration processes. However, this effect depended on empathic ability, suggesting that empathy, interoception and social perspective taking are inherently linked.
Peripersonal space (PPS) is defined as the space surrounding the body where we can reach or be reached by external entities, including objects or other individuals. PPS is an essential component of bodily self-consciousness that allows us to perform actions in the world (e.g., grasping and manipulating objects) and protect our body while interacting with the surrounding environment. Multisensory processing plays a critical role in PPS representation, facilitating not only to situate ourselves in space but also assisting in the localization of external entities at a close distance from our bodies. Such abilities appear especially crucial when an external entity (a sound, an object, or a person) is approaching us, thereby allowing the assessment of the salience of a potential incoming threat. Accordingly, PPS represents a key aspect of social cognitive processes operational when we interact with other people (for example, in a dynamic dyad). The underpinnings of PPS have been investigated largely in human models and in animals and include the operation of dedicated multimodal neurons (neurons that respond specifically to co-occurring stimuli from different perceptive modalities, e.g., auditory and tactile stimuli) within brain regions involved in sensorimotor processing (ventral intraparietal sulcus, ventral premotor cortex), interoception (insula), and visual recognition (lateral occipital cortex). Although the defensive role of the PPS has been observed in psychopathology (e.g., in phobias) the relation between PPS and altered states of bodily consciousness remains largely unexplored. Specifically, PPS representation in trauma-related disorders, where altered states of consciousness can involve dissociation from the body and its surroundings, have not been investigated. Accordingly, we review here: (1) the behavioral and neurobiological literature surrounding trauma-related disorders and its relevance to PPS; and (2) outline future research directions aimed at examining altered states of bodily self-consciousness in trauma related-disorders.