Louise Kirsch

Université Paris Cité | Paris 5 · CNRS - Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC)

As social beings, we are adept at coordinating our body movements and gaze with others. Often, when coordinating with another person, we orient ourselves to face them, as mutual gaze provides valuable cues pertaining to attention and intentions. Moreover, movement synchrony and mutual gaze are associated with prosocial outcomes, yet the perceptual...

Restricted interpersonal touch experiences, for instance due to COVID-19 social distancing measures, results in detrimental effects on anxiety, loneliness and psychological well-being. Yet, interventions capable of mitigating the impact of social touch deprivation, as experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, remain insufficient. In this study, con...

What would a theory of visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) look like? Here, ten researchers in the field, many with different theoretical viewpoints and empirical approaches, present their consensus on the three big questions we need to answer in order to bring this theory (or these theories) closer.

As social beings, we are adept at coordinating bodily movements and gaze with others. Often, when coordinating with another person, we orient ourselves to face them, as mutual gaze provides valuable cues pertaining to attention and intentions. Moreover, motor synchrony and mutual gaze are associated with prosocial outcomes, yet the perceptual conse...

Our emotional state can influence how we understand other people's emotions, leading to biases in social understanding. Yet emotional egocentric biases in specific relationships such as parent-child dyads, where not only understanding but also emotional and bodily regulation is key, remain relatively unexplored. To investigate these biases and cont...

Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which is central to effectively understanding and interacting with our environment and other people. Interoception, the sense of the physiological state of our body, is also a fundamental component contributing to our perception. However, whether the perception of our inner b...

Social touch is crucial for human well-being, as a lack of tactile interactions increases anxiety, loneliness, and need for social support. To address the detrimental effects of social isolation, we build on cutting-edge research on social touch and movement sonification to investigate whether social tactile gestures could be perceived through soun...

Using a database of vibratory signals captured from the index finger of participants performing self-touch or touching another person, we wondered whether these signals contained information that enabled the automatic classification into categories of self-touch and other-touch. The database included signals where the tactile pressure was varied sy...

Our emotional state can influence how we understand other people’s emotions, leading to biases in social understanding. Yet these biases have not been studied in specific relationships such as parent-child dyads, where not only understanding but also emotional and bodily regulation is key. We first conducted two experiments in adult stranger’s dyad...

What leads us to enjoy watching others’ bodies in motion? In this chapter, the authors discuss their motivation to explore how our bodily experiences, especially in the form of dance training, shape our perceptions and preferences for watching others move, especially in dance contexts. They highlight findings from several studies that they conducte...

Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which is central to effectively understanding and interacting with our environment and other people. Sensory impairments such as blindness are known to impact spatial representations and perspective-taking is often thought of as a visual process. However, disturbed functionin...

Neuroscience joins the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. In this volume, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume will inform and stimulate...

Social touch has positive effects on social affiliation and stress alleviation. However, its ubiquitous presence in human life does not allow the study of social touch deprivation ‘in the wild’. Nevertheless, COVID-19-related restrictions such as social distancing allowed the systematic study of the degree to which social distancing affects tactile...

Interoception, the sense of the physiological state of the body, and perspective-taking, the ability to take another’s point of view, are two fundamental components contributing to our perception and interaction with the external world. However, whether the perception of our inner body influences how we perceive the external world and other people...

Perceiving art is known to elicit motor cortex activation in an observer's brain. This motor activation has often been attributed to a covert approach response associated with the emotional valence of an art piece (emotional reaction hypothesis). However, recent accounts have proposed that aesthetic experiences could be grounded in the motor simula...

The syndrome of anosognosia for hemiplegia, or the lack of awareness for one’s paralysis following right hemisphere stroke, can provide unique insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of self-awareness. Yet it remains unclear whether anosognosia for hemiplegia is a modality-specific deficit of sensorimotor monitoring, or whether domain-general p...

Introduction A three-level model of interoception has recently been defined. We aim to study the interoceptive processing in individuals with functional motor disorder (FMD). Methods Twenty-two patients with FMD were compared to 23 healthy controls. They underwent a protocol measuring different levels of interoception including: accuracy (an heart...

Social touch has positive effects on social affiliation and stress alleviation. However, its ubiquitous presence in human life does not allow the study of social touch deprivation ‘in the wild’. Nevertheless, COVID-19-related restrictions such as social distancing allowed the systematic study of the degree to which social distancing affects tactile...

Information from the environment can be perceived according to ego-centered or decentered spatial perspectives. Different spatial perspectives can be adopted when perceiving not only visual but also auditory or tactile information. Because vision may be dominant in setting up spatial information processing, visual loss might affect perspective taki...

The syndrome of anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP), or the lack of awareness for one's paralysis following right hemisphere stroke, can provide unique insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of self-awareness. Yet it remains unclear whether AHP is a modality-specific deficit of sensorimotor monitoring, or whether domain-general processes of atten...

Skin-to-skin touch is an essential form of tactile interaction, yet there is no known method to quantify how we touch our own skin or someone else’s skin. Skin-to-skin touch is particularly challenging to measure objectively, since interposing an instrumented sheet, no matter how thin and flexible, between the interacting skins is not an option. To...

Skin-to-skin touch is an essential form of tactile interaction, yet, there is no known method to quantify how we touch our own skin or someone else's skin. Skin-to-skin touch is particularly challenging to measure objectively since interposing an instrumented sheet, no matter how thin and flexible, between the interacting skins is not an option. To...

Right hemisphere stroke can impair the ability to recognise one’s contralesional body parts as belonging to one’s self. The study of this so-called ‘disturbed sense of limb ownership’ can provide unique insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of body ownership. Here, we address a hypothesis built upon experimental studies on body ownership in h...

Specific, peripheral C-tactile afferents contribute to the perception of tactile pleasure, but the brain areas involved in their processing remain debated. We report the first human lesion study on the perception of C-tactile touch in right hemisphere stroke patients (N = 59), revealing that right posterior and anterior insula lesions reduce tactil...

Right hemisphere stroke can impair the ability to recognise one's contralesional body parts as belonging to one's self. The study of this so-called 'disturbed sense of limb ownership' (DSO) can provide unique insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms of body ownership. Here, we address a hypothesis built upon experimental studies on body ownershi...

Individuals differ both in spatial and social perspective-taking, yet the links between the two are not well understood. Individuals differ in the spatial perspective they naturally adopt, but also in their ability to change perspectives. The present study investigated whether individual differences in spatial perspective-taking are related to soci...

The vestibular system has been shown to contribute to multisensory integration by balancing conflictual sensory information. It remains unclear whether such modulation of exteroceptive (e.g., vision), proprioceptive, and interoceptive (e.g., affective touch) sensory sources is influenced by epistemically different aspects of tactile stimulation (i....

Touch can give rise to different sensations including sensory, emotional and social aspects. Tactile pleasure typically associated with caress-like skin stroking of slow velocities (1-10 cm/s) has been hypothesised to relate to an unmyelinated, slow-conducting C-tactile afferent system (CT system), developed to distinguish affective touch from the...

Specific, peripheral C-tactile afferents contribute to the perception of tactile pleasure, but the brain areas involved in their processing remain debated. We report the first human lesion study on the perception of C-tactile touch (N = 59), revealing that posterior and anterior right insula lesions reduce tactile, contralateral and ipsilateral ple...

Background: The vestibular system has been shown to contribute to multisensory integration by balancing conflictual sensory information. It remains unclear whether such modulation of exteroceptive (e.g. vision), proprioceptive and interoceptive (e.g. affective touch) sensory sources is influenced by epistemically different aspects of tactile stimul...

Our sense of body ownership relies on integrating different sensations according to their temporal and spatial congruency. Nevertheless, there is ongoing controversy about the role of affective congruency during multisensory integration, i.e. whether the stimuli to be perceived by the different sensory channels are congruent or incongruent in terms...

Our sense of body ownership relies on integrating different sensations according to their temporal and spatial congruency. Nevertheless, there is ongoing controversy about the role of affective congruency during multisensory integration, i.e. whether the stimuli to be perceived by the different sensory channels are congruent or incongruent in terms...

Our sense of body ownership relies on integrating different sensations according to their temporal and spatial congruency. Nevertheless, there is ongoing controversy about the role of affective congruency during multisensory integration, i.e. whether the stimuli to be perceived by the different sensory channels are congruent or incongruent in terms...

How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural...

Supplementary Table 1: regions that can accurately discriminate better between physically trained and untrained movements on day 5. (a) Younger adults. (b) Older adults. Supplementary Figure 1: recognition accuracy average scores in young and older adults. After the post-training scan on day 5, participants watched each dance movie stimulus again (...

The experience of our body as our own (i.e. body ownership) involves integrating different sensory signals according to their contextual relevance (i.e. multisensory integration). Until recently, most studies of multisensory integration and body ownership concerned only vision, touch and proprioception; the role of other modalities, such as the ves...

Understanding how action perception, embodiment, and emotion interact is essential for advancing knowledge about how we perceive and interact with each other in a social world. One tool that has proved particularly useful in the past decade for exploring the relationship between perception, action, and affect is dance. Dance is, in its essence, a r...

Studies investigating human motor learning and movement perception have shown that similar sensorimotor brain regions are engaged when we observe or perform action sequences. However, the way these networks enable translation of complex observed actions into motor commands—such as in the context of dance—remains poorly understood. Emerging evidence...

The mammalian need for social proximity, attachment and belonging may have an adaptive and evolutionary value in terms of survival and reproductive success. Consequently, ostracism may induce strong negative feelings of social exclusion. Recent studies suggest that slow, affective touch, which is mediated by a separate, specific C tactile neurophys...

Touch is central to interpersonal interactions. Touch conveys specific emotions about the touch provider, but it is not clear whether this is a purely socially learned function or whether it has neurophysiological specificity. In two experiments with healthy participants (N = 76 and 58) and one neuropsychological single case study, we investigated...

Perceiving others in action elicits affective and aesthetic responses in observers. The present study investigates the extent to which these responses relate to an observer’s general experience with observed movements. Facial electromyographic (EMG) responses were recorded in experienced dancers and non-dancers as they watched short videos of movem...

Less than two decades after its inception, the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics continues to grow in interest and momentum. Despite the biological and social importance of the human body and the attention people pay to its appearance in daily life, only recently has neuroaesthetic inquiry turned its attention to questions concerning the aestheti...

The way in which we perceive others in action is biased by one's prior experience with an observed action. For example, we can have auditory, visual, or motor experience with actions we observe others perform. How action experience via 1, 2, or all 3 of these modalities shapes action perception remains unclear. Here, we combine pre- and post-traini...

Supplementary methods. Description of the procedure for the different training conditions: physical, visual, and auditory (PVA) experience; visual and auditory (VA) experience; and auditory experience only. Supplementary results 1. Physical performance over the 4 days of training and VA accuracy. Supplementary results 2. Affective judgment—differen...

Previous research on aesthetic preferences demonstrates that people are more likely to judge a stimulus as pleasing if it is familiar. Although general familiarity and liking are related, it is less clear how motor familiarity, or embodiment, relates to a viewer's aesthetic appraisal. This study directly compared how learning to embody an action im...

Past research demonstrates that we are more likely to positively evaluate a stimulus if we have had previous experience with that stimulus. This has been shown for judgment of faces, architecture, artworks and body movements. In contrast, other evidence suggests that this relationship can also work in the inverse direction, at least in the domain o...

We have investigated links between biological motion perception and time perception. Participants compared the durations of two paired visual frames, inside which task-irrelevant sequences of static body postures were presented. The sequences produced apparent movements of shorter and longer path lengths, depending on the sequential order of body p...

The field of neuroaesthetics attracts attention from neuroscientists and artists interested in the neural underpinnings of esthetic experience. Though less studied than the neuroaesthetics of visual art, dance neuroaesthetics is a particularly rich subfield to explore, as it is informed not only by research on the neurobiology of aesthetics, but al...

When grasping and lifting different objects, visual cues and previously acquired knowledge enable us to prepare the upcoming grasp by scaling the fingertip forces according to the actual weight of the object. However, when no visual information is available, the weight of the object has to be predicted based on information learned from previous gra...