Investigating social modulations of spatial representations through language
Humans perceive space as functional to action. Several studies have shown that humans organize space into a peripersonal (i.e., within reach) and an extrapersonal (i.e., outside reach) region.
Interestingly, a lot of the actions we perform in our daily life are performed together with others. Do we adapt the way in which we parse space as near vs. far oto the position of other people when action goals are shared?
We tested this hypothesis over two interactive experiments using language as a proxy for spatial representations. We found that, in the context of joint action, linguistic coding of locations as proximal vs. distal is based on the position of the partner rather than oneself’s.
These studies (part of my PhD) are published in Nature Scientific Reports. The article is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51134-8