Will Social Distancing Have a Lasting Impact on ‘Personal Space’? Martinos Center faculty members are studying the possible long-term effects of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Daphne Holt and Roger Tootell have long explored the neuroscience of personal space, seeking deeper understandings of the “comfort zone” we maintain around our bodies, consciously or not, and how the brain works to regulate this space. Two years ago, Holt and Tootell began using a new paradigm to help advance this work: a virtual reality model that provided a more reliable means to track individuals’ sense of personal space. After enrolling 19 subjects and measuring their responses to approaching avatars (virtual “persons”) in the virtual reality environment, they were optimistic about the new paradigm and what it might tell them about the neural underpinnings of personal space. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The pandemic not only shut down all experiments at the Martinos Center for a number of months, it also presented a confounding factor when the studies resumed later in the summer. Namely: because it created dramatically different circumstances for subjects, the researchers could no longer conduct the experiments under the same conditions as before, and therefore would have to discontinue the original study. However, Holt and Tootell saw an opportunity in the disruption to their work that the pandemic had caused: they could bring back subjects from the original round of experiments and, by comparing the measurements obtained before and after the onset of the pandemic, explore the potential impact of COVID—not least, the social distancing protocols put in place to help fight the virus—on individuals’ sense of personal space. Ultimately, twelve of the subjects returned for additional experiments. The researchers analyzed the data from these new measurements, Left: A screen-capture from a virtual reality-based intervention the researchers have developed. The intervention can serve as a type of exposure therapy, with approaching avatars, for patients with social functioning challenges associated with increased personal space requirements.
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