The body anchors the self to a certain spatial location. This raises the possibility that perception of the body and perception of space may interact.

I will address this question by first looking at how the two interact in the context of memory. I will present a series of experiments featuring a visit to a virtual museum (Babo-Rebelo et al, PNAS 2022). These experiments demonstrate how an aesthetic experience is consolidated in memory with a first-person trace of the space where it was experienced. I will then present the case of a patient suffering from profound amnesia (Meyer*, Babo-Rebelo* et al, BiorXiv 2025), in whom we have shown how alterations in body perception during the encoding of new events impair the recovery of her spatial perspective.

In the second part of this talk, I will show that spatial representation and body perception share some neural mechanisms. I will present an fMRI experiment (Babo-Rebelo*, Moon*, in prep), which demonstrates the existence of grid-cells encoding the trajectory of tactile stimuli.