Visuospatial working memory abilities and spontaneous sensations perception

Abstract

Aim: Body awareness arises when attending to and maintaining awareness of visuospatial body representations. By the same token, focussing on representations transfers them to working memory. Body awareness and working memory seemingly rely on similar processes and recruit common parietal areas involved in perception. Therefore, we asked whether visuospatial working memory abilities would define individual differences in the perception of spontaneous sensations (SPS), i.e., bodily sensations perceived in the absence of triggers (e.g., tactile stimulation or movement), when attending to the body.

Method: Participants completed two visuospatial working memory tasks to assess various mechanisms: (i) the decay of representations was assessed through a Brown-Peterson task in which the delay between the memorandum presentation and its recall was manipulated, and (ii) the impact of distractors’ interference and cognitive load (i.e., complexity) on recall performances were assessed through a complex span task that required the processing of distractors while maintaining a memorandum. A standard SPS task involving localization and characterization of SPS perceived on the hands was completed afterwards.

Results: Low performance due to decay, distractors’ interference and cognitive load in visuospatial working memory was associated with a decrease in the frequency of SPS. Additionally, low performance due to distractors’ cognitive load predicted a decrease in the perception of surface-type sensations, and high performance despite distractors’ interference led to a better perception of SPS on less sensitive areas of the hand.

Conclusion: We discuss how visuospatial working memory processes might contribute to body awareness and perceptual distortions of the body.

Keywords:

• Spontaneous sensations
• visuospatial
• working memory
• decay
• interference
• cognitive load

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 α=covariance(x,y)/variance(x), where x is the task complexity level (0, 1, and 2), and y is the percentage of errors.

Additional information

Funding

This study benefited from LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) funding from the University of Lyon, under the ‘Investissements d'Avenir’ programme (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) run by the French National Research Agency (ANR). It also benefited from a Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes grant (Direction des Finances 28/06), and from a Direction de la Recherche et des Ecoles Doctorales grant from Lumière University Lyon 2 (DRED no. 2018-30). It also received financial support from the Institute for Psychology of Lumière University Lyon 2.