Author: Laura Sanders / Source: Science News
Lots of changes come with pregnancy, but perhaps none is as obvious as the ever-growing midsection. Pregnant women’s bodies accommodate their babies in many ways — rib cages stretch, lungs bunch up around the throat and belly buttons pop out — as the fetus takes over every possible centimeter of available real estate.
Along with that physical expansion comes an interesting mental one: Late in pregnancy, women’s sense of personal space grows too, a preliminary study finds. Pregnant women’s peripersonal space — the personal bubble defined as her own — expands during the third trimester, Flavia Cardini of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and colleagues reported December 10 at bioRxiv.org.
To define the boundaries of peripersonal space, the researchers asked blindfolded participants to push a button as soon as they felt a light tap on the abdomen. Their responses could be tweaked with another signal: a 3-second-long sound that seemed to start far away and then move closer.
People are slower to respond to a tap given while the sound is far away. But like a Karate-Kid chopstick to a fly, people’s reaction times to the tap sped up when the sound seemed closer, earlier studies have found.
By pinpointing the…
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