Thesis title: Interpersonal interactions and their impact on perceptual processes, from action observation to multisensory inferences
When moving in a constantly changing world, we are continuously bombarded by sensory information, both from the external environment and from our own body. As social creatures, we act upon the external world while also interacting with other individuals. In this framework, understanding if and how perceptual processes plastically adapt to environmental changes remains a crucial question in order to better understand how the brain works.
This thesis focuses on the relationship between interpersonal motor interactions and perception. Specifically, it moves from the study of action observation and monitoring, with individual both minimally interacting and dynamically moving, to the investigation of whether
and how the interaction with the environment and with others modulates off-line (i.e., following the interaction) multisensory computations. The results discussed highlight the strong influence of interactive contexts on the perception of moving bodies, the activity in the dopaminergic system related to predictive processes, the integration of multisensory information and the inference of the causal structures of the world.
All in all, the present work presents innovative results from different fields of social neuroscience, bridging multiple theoretical backgrounds, hypotheses, and experimental setups demonstrating the complexity of the brain processes required to interact with our social environment.