Altered bodily self-consciousness and peripersonal space in autism.
Adults with autism feel less ownership of a virtual body and keep a smaller, sharper personal-space bubble.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Mul et al. (2019) asked the adults with autism and 24 matched neurotypical adults to wear virtual-reality goggles.
While the adults watched a mannequin being stroked on the back, the researchers also stroked the real backs of the adults.
This setup can create the "full-body illusion" — people feel the mannequin is their own body.
The team also mapped how close an object could get before each adult felt it was "in their space."
They wanted to see if autism changes bodily self-consciousness and peripersonal space.
What they found
The neurotypical group quickly felt the mannequin was their body.
The autism group felt the illusion only half as strongly.
Their "bubble" of personal space was also smaller and had sharper edges.
These bodily differences tracked with social-cognitive scores: weaker illusion went with more autism traits.
How this fits with other research
McGarty et al. (2018) seems to disagree. They found that adults with autism still show a normal self-bias when judging pictures that match their own face.
The two studies differ because quick picture judgments use simple vision, while the full-body illusion needs vision plus touch.
Different brain routes handle each task, so both results can be true.
Smith et al. (2008) set the stage by showing that agency — knowing you caused an action — stays intact in autism even when mentalizing fails.
Cari-Lène now adds that body ownership, another piece of self-awareness, is weaker.
De Coster et al. (2018) extend the idea: when adults with autism were imitated, their empathy for pain rose, showing that self-other boundaries can still be nudged.
Why it matters
If a client seems to stand "too close" or reacts oddly to shared spaces, it may reflect a tighter peripersonal boundary, not just social awkwardness.
Use clear visual floor marks or arm-length cues to show where "your space" ends and "my space" begins.
When teaching skills like group work or sports, start with larger personal zones and shrink them slowly.
Finally, remember that imitation games can help loosen self-other walls and boost social responding.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
There is some evidence that disordered self-processing in autism spectrum disorders is linked to the social impairments characteristic of the condition. To investigate whether bodily self-consciousness is altered in autism spectrum disorders as a result of multisensory processing differences, we tested responses to the full body illusion and measured peripersonal space in 22 adults with autism spectrum disorders and 29 neurotypical adults. In the full body illusion set-up, participants wore a head-mounted display showing a view of their 'virtual body' being stroked synchronously or asynchronously with respect to felt stroking on their back. After stroking, we measured the drift in perceived self-location and self-identification with the virtual body. To assess the peripersonal space boundary we employed an audiotactile reaction time task. The results showed that participants with autism spectrum disorders are markedly less susceptible to the full body illusion, not demonstrating the illusory self-identification and self-location drift. Strength of self-identification was negatively correlated with severity of autistic traits and contributed positively to empathy scores. The results also demonstrated a significantly smaller peripersonal space, with a sharper (steeper) boundary, in autism spectrum disorders participants. These results suggest that bodily self-consciousness is altered in participants with autism spectrum disorders due to differences in multisensory integration, and this may be linked to deficits in social functioning.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2019 · doi:10.1177/1362361319838950