Body and peri-personal space representations: insights and biomarkers from a novel Virtual Reality-based setting

This dataset contains raw data of the study participants's right hand trajectories while accomplishing reaching and grabbing movements toward 9 targets in 3 different conditions. Reaches toward the 9 targets were repeated 5 times. Such targets were 5-cm cubes placed on the right side of the participants placed in a 3x3 grid. Participants were required to reach for the cubes, grab them and drop them in a hole placed in the middle of the table, in correspondance of their sternum. The horizontal distance between the hole and the nearest cube was 15 cm; the distance between two cubes was 5 cm, both in the horizontal and the vertical direction. The entire grid covered an area of 25x25 cm. The virtual exercise required the participant to: (i) wait for a specific cube in the grid to highlight in blue, (ii) reach for the highlighted cube, and (iii) grab it; (iv) transport the cube above the hole, and (v) release it. One trial consisted of the reach, grab, transport, and release of all nine cubes. The minimum time between two subsequent cube highlights was 4 seconds. If the participants ended the movement before the new cube was highlighted, they were instructed to wait with her/his hand still on the hole. To ease the participant, only the highlighted cube was interactable. Three different conditions were designed for carrying out the exercise, namely active, mirror, and inverted mirror. The first condition envisioned the exercise as it would be in real life: participants could see their avatar in 1st-person perspective (1PP) and the cubes placed on the table in front of them. The other two conditions introduced contextual modifiers of perception. In the first case, a mirror was placed in front of the participants' avatar, allowing them to observe their virtual bodies and the cubes in the mirror from a 3rd-person perspective (3PP). The view in 1PP was intentionally hidden. In the case of the inverted mirror condition, the view in 3PP was the same as in the mirror condition, but the image reflected by the mirror appeared non-reversed, i.e., symmetrically flipped on the vertical axis. The virtual environment used for this study was developed with Unity 2020.3.36f and deployed for the HTC Vive Pro Virtual Reality system. The interaction with virtual objects in the scene was achieved using data gloves without haptic feedback (MANUS Prime II) and implemented using the manufacturer-provided libraries. Hand movements in the 3D space were tracked by means of HTC Vive Trackers 2.