Psychological and physiological evidence for an initial ‘Rough Sketch’ calculation of personal space

Personal space has been defined as “the area individuals maintain around themselves into which others cannot intrude without arousing discomfort”. However, the precise relationship between discomfort (or arousal) responses as a function of distance from an observer remains incompletely understood. Also the mechanisms involved in recognizing conspecifics and distinguishing them from other objects within personal space have not been identified. Accordingly, here we measured personal space preferences in response to real humans and human-like avatars (in virtual reality), using well-validated “stop distance” procedures. Based on threshold measurements of personal space, we examined within-subject variations in discomfort-related responses across multiple distances (spanning inside and outside each individual’s personal space boundary), as reflected by psychological (ratings) and physiological (skin conductance) responses to both humans and avatars. We found that the discomfort-by-distance functions for both humans and avatars were closely fit by a power law. These results suggest that the brain computation of visually-defined personal space begins with a ‘rough sketch’ stage, which generates responses to a broad range of human-like stimuli, in addition to humans. Analogous processing mechanisms may underlie other brain functions which respond similarly to both real and simulated human body parts.