Main description:

What difference is there between the visual experience of watching the moon in the sky and the visual experience of seeing a snake slither by your foot?

It is easy to believe our interpretation of the world is split into a binary mode, between the bodily self and everything outside it. There is, however, a buffer zone in the immediate surrounding of the body, known as peripersonal space, in which boundaries are blurred. The notion of peripersonal space calls into question not only our entrenched theories of perception, but also has major implications on the way we perceive personal and social awareness.

Research has yielded a vast array of exciting discoveries on peripersonal space, across a variety of disciplines: ethology, social psychology, anthropology, neurology, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience. The World at Our Fingertips: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Peripersonal Space brings these perspectives together for the first time, as well as introducing a philosophical dialogue to the questions.

Edited by a team of leading psychologists and philosophers in the fields of peripersonal space and bodily awareness, this comprehensive volume presents the reader with a fresh, accessible dialogue between authorities from vastly different areas of thought.

Contents:

Frederique de Vignemont, Andrea Serino, Hong Yu Wong, and Alessandro Farne: Peripersonal space: A special way of representing space
Part I : Perception, Prediction and Action
1: Jean-Paul Noel, Tommaso Bertoni, and Andrea Serino: Peri-Personal Space as an Interface for Self-Environment Interaction; A Critical Evaluation and Look Ahead
2: Elvio Blini, Alessandro Farne, Claudio Brozzoli, and Fadila Hadj-Bouziane: Close is better: visual perception in peripersonal space
3: Justine Clery and Suliann Ben Hamed: Functional networks for peripersonal space coding and prediction of impact to the body
4: H.C. Dijkerman and W.P. Medendorp: Visuotactile predictive mechanisms of peripersonal space
5: Catherine L. Reed and George D. Park: Functional Actions of Hands and Tools Influence Attention in Peripersonal Space
6: Wayne Wu: Dissecting the Experience of Space as Peripersonal
Part II : Space and Maps
7: Colin Klein: Do we represent peripersonal space?
8: RJ Bufacchi and GD Iannetti: What do "PPS measures" really reflect?
9: Frederique de Vignemont: Feeling the world as being here
10: Mohan Matthen: The dual structure of touch: the body vs peripersonal space
11: Alisa Mandrigin and Matthew Nudds: Sameness of Place, and the Senses
12: Adrian Alsmith: The structure of egocentric space
III: The Space of Self and Others
13: Matthew Fulkerson: Peripersonal Space, Bodily Self-Awareness, and the Integrated Self
14: Yann Coello and Tina Iachini: The social dimension of peripersonal space
15: Michela Candini, Giuseppe di Pellegrino, and Francesca Frassinetti: Action and social spaces in typical development and in Autism Spectrum Disorder
16: Anders Pape Moller: Risk-taking behavior as a central concept in evolutionary biology
17: Michael Graziano: Human Emotional Expression and the Peripersonal Margin of Safety