The World at Our Fingertips A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Peripersonal Space

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.

Fr?d?rique de Vignemont, CNRS senior researcher, Institut Jean Nicod, Department of cognitive studies, Paris, France,Andrea Serino, Professor, Head of Myspace Lab, CHUV, University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland,Hong Yu Wong, Professor, Chair of Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, University of T?bingen, T?bingen, Germany,Alessandro Farn?, INSERM senior researcher, ImpAct, Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre, Lyon, France

Dr Fr?d?rique de Vignemont is a CNRS senior researcher in philosophy in Paris. She is the deputy director of the Jean Nicod Institute as well as a philosophy scholar in residence at NYU Paris. She is also one of the executive editors of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Her research exists at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Upon completing her PhD, she was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to work at NYU, and in 2015 she was awarded the Young Ming & Brain Prize for her achievements in advancing our knowledge of the mind and the brain.

She has been published widely in philosophy and psychology journals, and is the author of Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness with Oxford University Press in 2018.


Professor Andrea Serino is SNSF Professor at the University Hospital of Laussane, Head of Neuroscience at MindMaze, and Invited Professor at the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the EPFL. He completed his PhD in Neuropsychology at the University of Bologna, where he was assistant professor from 2006-2012. His main research focus is understanding the neural and cognitive basis of the body and self-experience in space.

He has been widely published in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Neuron, Stroke, and Brain. In 2006, he was awarded the De Renzi Prize by the Italian Society of Neuropsychology, and in 2016 he was the recipient of the Leenards Prize for translational research.


Professor Hong Yu Wong is Chair of Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science at the Philosophisches Seminar and Head of the Philosophy of Neuroscience (PONS) Research Group at the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of T?bingen. He is also a faculty member of the Max Planck Neural and Behavioural Graduate School and the T?bingen Cognitive Science Programme. His primary research interests concern the relations between perception and action, and the role of the body in structuring these relations.

His honours include a Templeton Foundation ACT Fellowship (2017-2020), the Annual Essay Prize for work on multimodality from the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp (2012), and the European Science Foundation's CNCC Essay Award for interdisciplinary work on consciousness (2008).


Dr Alessandro Farn? is INSERM senior researcher with the ImpAct team at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre.

Peripersonal space: A special way of representing space, Fr?d?rique de Vignemont, Andrea Serino, Hong Yu Wong, and Alessandro Farn?
Part I : Perception, Prediction and Action
1. Peri-Personal Space as an Interface for Self-Environment Interaction; A Critical Evaluation and Look Ahead, Jean-Paul No?l, Tommaso Bertoni, and Andrea Serino
2. Close is better: visual perception in peripersonal space, Elvio Blini, Alessandro Farn?, Claudio Brozzoli, and Fadila Hadj-Bouziane
3. Functional networks for peripersonal space coding and prediction of impact to the body, Justine Cl?ry and Suliann Ben Hamed
4. Visuotactile predictive mechanisms of peripersonal space, H.C. Dijkerman and W.P. Medendorp
5. Functional Actions of Hands and Tools Influence Attention in Peripersonal Space, Catherine L. Reed and George D. Park
6. Dissecting the Experience of Space as Peripersonal, Wayne Wu
Part II : Space and Maps
7. Do we represent peripersonal space?, Colin Klein
8. What do "PPS measures" really reflect?, RJ Bufacchi and GD Iannetti
9. Feeling the world as being here, Fr?d?rique de Vignemont
10. The dual structure of touch: the body vs peripersonal space, Mohan Matthen
11. Sameness of Place, and the Senses, Alisa Mandrigin and Matthew Nudds
12. The structure of egocentric space, Adrian Alsmith
III: The Space of Self and Others
13. Peripersonal Space, Bodily Self-Awareness, and the Integrated Self, Matthew Fulkerson
14. The social dimension of peripersonal space, Yann Coello and Tina Iachini
15. Action and social spaces in typical development and in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Michela Candini, Giuseppe di Pellegrino, and Francesca Frassinetti
16. Risk-taking behavior as a central concept in evolutionary biology, Anders Pape M?ller
17. Human Emotional Expression and the Peripersonal Margin of Safety, Michael Graziano