Visuo-proprioceptive conflicts and nociception

Torta, Diana [UCL]

Pain has the evolutionary function of protecting the body. It has been proposed that brain activations in response to nociceptive stimuli reflect, at least partly, the activity of a multimodal attentional system which detects potential dangers in the peripersonal space (that is, the space surrounding our body) and organizes appropriate responses. There is growing interest in understanding how the perception of pain is influenced by body and space representation and, viceversa, how pain can shape the representation of our body and the surrounding space. In this talk, evidence will be discussed about how we localize somatosensory stimuli on our body and how conflicts between vision and proprioception, induced by uncommon body postures and the use of prismatic lenses, affect the processing of these stimuli.