The space surrounding the body where physical interactions with external stimuli occur is referred to as peripersonal space (PPS). Traditionally conceived as a spatial construct, PPS is better understood as a neural representation that integrates bodily inputs with external cues to predict body-object interactions. After summarizing its multisensory, motor, and plastic properties, this review...
Brain and CognitionJuly 9, 2026Stephanie Clarke, Sonia Crottaz-Herbette, Simo Frestadius et al.
Several neuroimaging studies demonstrated that spiritual/religious beliefs and practices rely on the same brain regions as secular cognition. Several reviews shaped the framework within which religious and secular cognition interacts, emphasizing the need for a precise definition of religiousness and spirituality. Christian faith presents a well-defined theological context, characterized by...
Reliably detecting consciousness in unresponsive patients remains an urgent ethical and clinical challenge, as no behavior-independent marker is currently accepted in clinical practice. We characterize consciousness as linked to a representation of the embodied subject of experience, mediated by multisensory integration within the peripersonal space (PPS) system. We test whether a neural marker...
Our brain has developed a specific system to represent the space closely surrounding the body, termed peripersonal space (PPS), which has a key functional role as it is were all physical interactions with objects in the environment occur. Here I describe how multisensory neurons in a specific frontoparietal network map the PPS by integrating tactile stimuli on the body with visual or auditory...
Simple multisensory manipulations can induce the illusory misattribution of external objects to one's own body, allowing to experimentally investigate body ownership. In this context, body ownership has been conceptualized as the result of the online Bayesian optimal estimation of the probability that one object belongs to the body from the congruence of multisensory inputs. This idea has been...
Integrating information across sensory systems is a critical step toward building a cohesive representation of the environment and one's body, and as illustrated by numerous illusions, scaffolds subjective experience of the world and self. In the last years, classic principles of multisensory integration elucidated in the subcortex have been translated into the language of statistical inference...
The environment shapes our experience of space in constant interaction with the body. Architectonic interiors amplify the perception of space through the bodily senses; an effect also known as embodiment. The interaction of the bodily senses with the space surrounding the body can be tested experimentally through the manipulation of multisensory stimulation and measured via a range of behaviors...
Recent studies have highlighted the role of multisensory integration as a key mechanism of self-consciousness. In particular, integration of bodily signals within the peripersonal space (PPS) underlies the experience of the self in a body we own (self-identification) and that is experienced as occupying a specific location in space (self-location), two main components of bodily...
We take the feeling that our body belongs to us for granted. However, recent research has shown that it is possible to alter the subjective sensation of body ownership (BO) by manipulating multisensory bodily inputs. Several frontal and parietal regions are known to specifically process multisensory cues presented close to the body, i.e., within the peripersonal space (PPS). It has been...
The construct of the "self" is conceived as being fundamental in promoting survival. As such, extensive studies have documented preferential processing of self-relevant stimuli. For example, attributes that relate to the self are better encoded and retrieved, and are more readily consciously perceived. The preferential processing of self-relevant information, however, appears to be especially...
Abstract A fundamental component of conscious experience involves a first-person perspective (1PP), characterized by the experience of being a subject and of being directed at the world. Extending earlier work on multisensory perceptual mechanisms of 1PP, we here asked whether the experienced direction of the 1PP (i.e. the spatial direction of subjective experience of the world) depends on...
Recent neuroscience research emphasizes the embodied origins of the experience of the self. This chapter shows that further advances in the understanding of the phenomenon of VR-induced presence might be achieved in connection with advances in the understanding of the brain mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness. By reviewing the neural mechanisms that make the virtual reality experience...
Self-consciousness is the remarkable human experience of being a subject: the "I". Self-consciousness is typically bound to a body, and particularly to the spatial dimensions of the body, as well as to its location and displacement in the gravitational field. Because the vestibular system encodes head position and movement in three-dimensional space, vestibular cortical processing likely...