Aging affects the ability to process sensory input from the body (interoception) and integrate information from multiple sensory modalities. Interoception, which involves perceiving and interpreting internal bodily signals, undergoes significant changes with age, reducing the ability to recognize and respond to internal needs. Additionally, deficits in multisensory integration are known to predict declines in gait and stability, increasing the risk of falls and mobility issues in older adults. These changes impact physical health and hinder action planning and execution, yet the combined influence of interoception and multisensory integration on physical functioning remains underexplored. This study investigated how interoception and multisensory integration predict physical functioning in older adults compared to younger adults. Twenty-five young and twenty-eight older participants completed tasks assessing interoceptive dimensions (accuracy, sensibility, and awareness) and multisensory integration dimensions (temporal resolution and tactile acuity). Physical functioning was measured using the SF-36 questionnaire. In the older adult group, regression analyses revealed that interoceptive sensibility, interoceptive awareness, and multisensory temporal resolution significantly predicted physical functioning. Higher interoceptive sensibility and awareness were associated with better physical functioning, while reduced temporal resolution was linked to poorer functioning. These factors also predicted role limitations due to physical health: higher interoceptive awareness and sensibility were related to fewer limitations, whereas temporal resolution and tactile acuity were associated with greater limitations. These findings emphasize the critical role of interoceptive and multisensory processing in supporting physical functioning and managing perceived limitations in older adults, highlighting the importance of preserving these sensory capacities to maintain well-being in aging populations.

In our environments, we encode surrounding spatial information using egocentric (subject-to-object) and allocentric (object-to-object) reference frames. Spatial encoding, however, occurs in an environment populated by more than just “objects” but also by people, and this social information can have a significant impact on our spatial memory. Here, we investigated how implicit social information influences spatial encoding by designing a study with an explicit spatial task and implicit social cues. Participants performed a task where they memorized triads of geometric objects and provided egocentric and allocentric judgments of relative distance. Each object was positioned in front of pairs of social (virtual humans) and non-social stimuli (lamps and chairs, as control conditions). These stimuli, irrelevant to the spatial task, could be at different proxemic distances (intimate, personal, and social), and with mutual and non-mutual gaze (Facing/Not-Facing), in the case of virtual humans and chairs. A questionnaire assessing empathic disposition was also administered. The overall pattern of results showed that the egocentric processing was facilitated over the allocentric one when the social cues were clear and allowed an easy social categorization. Notably, no such advantage emerged when social categorizations required further processing to understand social relations. The empathic disposition was also associated with the spatial performance. In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that even when irrelevant to a task, social information, defined by nonverbal signals (proxemics distance and gaze), implicitly affects the way we represent our surrounding environment. This highlights the intertwined nature of spatial cognition and social processes in everyday life.

Background: Aging involves complex interactions among cognitive, bodily, and spatial processes that may contribute to autonomy and health-related quality of life. Although these processes have been investigated in relation to cognitive functioning, less is known about how spatial and bodily processes are associated with subjective health during cognitive aging. This issue is particularly relevant in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), a condition associated with cognitive changes that may affect spatial processing and perception of bodily states. The present study examined associations between egocentric and allocentric spatial processing, assessed through positive, negative, and neutral emotional stimuli, self-reported body awareness, and health-related quality of life in older adults (OA) and individuals with aMCI. Methods: Participants completed an egocentric–allocentric spatial task, the Body Perception Questionnaire–Body Awareness (BPQ-BOA), and the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36). Associations were examined separately for the two groups across eight SF-36 domains using bootstrap-based LASSO variable selection followed by multiple regression analyses. Results: In OA, Physical Functioning was positively associated with egocentric spatial performance for positive and neutral stimuli, while negative allocentric performance was negatively associated with Emotional Well-Being. In aMCI, Physical Functioning was positively associated with positive allocentric performance and self-reported body awareness, whereas positive egocentric performance and body awareness were negatively associated with Emotional Well-Being and Energy/Fatigue. Emotionally valenced spatial conditions were represented across several models, suggesting that emotional context may be relevant to the observed associations. Conclusions: The findings suggest that spatial processing and self-reported body awareness show domain-specific patterns of association with perceived health in OA and aMCI. However, given the cross-sectional design and the small sample size, the distinct patterns observed within each group should be interpreted more as reflecting correlational variations in individual profiles than structural or mechanistic changes in body–environment integration. Further studies using larger samples and longitudinal designs, complemented by behavioral, physiological, and neuroimaging measures, may help establish the reproducibility of these patterns and clarify their underlying processes.

Understanding how environmental contexts influence cognitive functioning is a key issue in cognitive science and applied ergonomics. This study examined whether everyday environmental settings modulate task performance and perceived cognitive workload during a card-matching memory task, using high-fidelity immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments. Participants performed the task by sequentially uncovering cards and remembering their spatial locations to identify matching pairs in two virtual scenarios: a naturalistic environment (urban park) and an artificial setting (office). The number of moves and time of execution were collected as behavioral measures. Perceived cognitive workload was assessed after task completion in each condition using the Simulation Task Load Index (SIM-TLX). Behavioral performances did not differ between environments. However, participants reported lower perceived cognitive workload when performing the task in the naturalistic environment. This effect was not uniform across individuals: the reduction in perceived cognitive workload was primarily observed among participants exhibiting high levels of task efficiency. These findings suggest that environmental context interacts with individual cognitive efficiency by modulating the perceived cognitive workload without necessarily affecting objective performance outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that naturalistic immersive virtual contexts may mitigate perceived cognitive workload during memory-based tasks, highlighting the role of contextual factors in influencing cognitive efforts under ecologically valid conditions.

Background/Objectives: Adaptive functioning involves the integration of bodily states with emotional information from the external environment. Interoceptive functioning and spatial cognition may contribute to this integration, but their joint associations with health-related quality of life (HRQoL) across adulthood remain insufficiently understood. Methods: We examined associations between multidimensional interoceptive functioning, emotional object-location memory, and HRQoL in younger adults (n = 43) and older adults (n = 38). Participants completed an immersive virtual-reality Object Location Memory task assessing object recognition (What), spatial location memory (Where), and object-location binding (What + Where) for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. Interoceptive functioning was assessed using the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) and the Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ), and HRQoL was assessed using the SF-36. For each SF-36 domain and age group, interoceptive predictors were screened using bootstrap-based LASSO selection and subsequently entered into multiple regression linear models together with the prespecified spatial-memory predictors. Model robustness was further examined using bootstrap, leave-one-out cross-validation, and permutation testing. Results: The regression analyses identified associations between interoceptive functioning, emotional object-location memory, and HRQoL. In older adults, selected dimensions of interoceptive functioning, particularly those related to attention regulation, adaptive engagement with bodily sensations, and confidence in bodily signals, were associated with several HRQoL domains. Emotional object-location memory also showed domain-specific associations, with positive- and negative-valence measures contributing differently across HRQoL outcomes. In younger adults, selected associations were also observed between interoceptive functioning, emotional object-location memory, and HRQoL, including associations involving neutral and positive object-location information. Conclusions: The findings provide exploratory evidence that specific dimensions of interoceptive functioning and emotionally modulated object-location memory are associated with selected aspects of self-reported HRQoL, with distinct patterns of associations emerging in younger and older adults.