Book review of 'Spatial dimensions of social thought' (original) (raw)

Spatial Thought, Social Thought

Spatial thought is not an internalized video of experience but rather a construction carved out of experience. Objects, categories, orderings: These constructive processes sharpen, level, add, subtract, simplify, complicate, and distort, not randomly, but in ways that contribute to sense-making. Parallel phenomena appear in social thought. For example, individuals are grouped into categories, and within-category differences are perceived as smaller than between-category differences. Categories are ordered into dimensions that are spatially arrayed from down to up and from left to right in western languages. These correspondences seem to arise from perception-action couplings, and suggest that spatial cognition can serve as a basis for social thought.

Spatial Distance and Mental Construal of Social Events

Psychological Science, 2006

Construal-level theory proposes that increasing the reported spatial distance of events leads individuals to represent the events by their central, abstract, global features (high-level construal) rather than by their peripheral, concrete, local features (low-level construal). Results of two experiments indicated that participants preferred to identify actions as ends rather than as means to a greater extent when these actions occurred at a spatially distant, as opposed to near, location (Study 1), and that they used more abstract language to recall spatially distant events, compared with near events (Study 2). These findings suggest that spatially distant events are associated with high-level construals, and that spatial distance can be conceptualized as a dimension of psychological distance.

The spatial and temporal underpinnings of social distance

Spatial Cognition VII, 2010

To what extent do people anchor thoughts about social relationships in terms of space and time? Three studies used drawing and estimation tasks to further explore the conceptual structure of “social” distance. In the three studies, participants read short narratives, drew what they imagined happening during the narrative, then estimated both time and distance. In general, results suggest that the conceptual structure of social relationships is linked to thought about space in terms of path drawing and temporal estimation, but not absolute distance estimation. Results are discussed in terms of mental simulation and intercharacter interaction.

Enacting interpersonal space: the role of the body in social cognition

he purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between high-level social processes and low-level sensorimotor processes. Specifically, it wants to show that human copresence and social interactions (high-level social representations), are immediately remapped in spatial representations (low-level sensorimotor processes).

Sharing Space: The Presence of Other Bodies Extends the Space Judged as Near

PLoS ONE, 2014

Background: As social animals we share the space with other people. It is known that perceived extension of the peripersonal space (the reaching space) is affected by the implicit representation of our own and other's action potentialities. Our issue concerns whether the co-presence of a body in the scene influences our extrapersonal space (beyond reaching distance) categorization. Methodology/Principal Findings: We investigated, through 3D virtual scenes of a realistic environment, whether egocentric spatial categorization can be influenced by the presence of another human body (Exp. 1) and whether the effect is due to her action potentialities or simply to her human-like morphology (Exp. 2). Subjects were asked to judge the location ("Near" or "Far") of a target object located at different distances from their egocentric perspective. In Exp. 1, the judgment was given either in presence of a virtual avatar (Self-with-Other), or a non-corporeal object (Self-with-Object) or nothing (Self). In Exp. 2, the Self condition was replaced by a Self-with-Dummy condition, in which an inanimate body (a wooden dummy) was present. Mean Judgment Transition Thresholds (JTTs) were calculated for each subject in each experimental condition. Self-with-Other condition induced a significant extension of the space judged as ''Near'' as compared to both the Selfwith-Object condition and the Self condition. Such extension was observed also in Exp. 2 in the Self-with-Dummy condition. Results suggest that the presence of others impacts on our perception of extrapersonal space. This effect holds also when the other is a human-like wooden dummy, suggesting that structural and morphological shapes resembling human bodies are sufficient conditions for the effect to occur. Conclusions: The observed extension of the portion of space judged as near could represent a wider portion of ''accessible'' space, thus an advantage in the struggle to survive in presence of other potential competing individuals.

Social spatial cognition: social distance dynamics as an identifier of social interactions

Animal Cognition, 2020

We suggest that socio-spatial behavior, which is an interaction between social and spatial cognition, can be viewed as a set of excursions that originate and end in close proximity to another individual(s). We present an extension of earlier studies that perceived spatial behavior in individual animals as a series of excursions originating from a particular location. We measured here the momentary distance between two individuals (social distance) to differentiate among eight possible types of social excursion originating in a state of proximity between excursion-participants. The defined excursion types are based on whether or not the excursion initiator also concludes the excursion, whether or not the excursion starts and ends at the same location, and the dynamics of the distance between excursion participants. We validated this approach to socio-spatial behavior as a set of excursions using it to analyze the behavior of the two sexes in rodents, of normal vs. stereotyped rats, as well as of different rodent species. Each of these groups displays a prevalent excursion type that reflects a distinct social dynamics. Our approach offers a useful and comprehensive tool for studying socio-spatial cognition, and can also be applied to distinguish among different social situations in rodents and other animals.

Space in social interaction. An introduction

Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique Appliquee

This issue addresses the relation between language and space by studying everyday settings of social interaction. 1 All contributions analyse videorecorded instances of interaction and focus, to different degrees, on the ways in which the available multimodal resources -talk, gaze, gesture, body positioning, objects, etc. -are used and coordinated for the practical purposes of the interaction. The authors employ research methods developed in empirically grounded approaches to interaction such as conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and multimodal interaction analysis. This issue is organised around four main thematic areas -Spatialities, Interactional space, Place names and deictics, Evolving spaces -that are also the fil rouge of the following state of the art developments on the relevance of space in linguistic investigations.

Transcending the "Here": The Effect of Spatial Distance on Social Judgment

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2006

Construal level theory proposes that increasing the reported spatial distance of events produces judgments that reflect abstract, schematic representations of the events. Across 4 experiments, the authors examined the impact of spatial distance on construal-dependent social judgments. Participants structured behavior into fewer, broader units (Study 1) and increasingly attributed behavior to enduring dispositions rather than situational constraints (Study 2) when the behavior was spatially distant rather than near. Participants reported that typical events were more likely and atypical events less likely when events were more spatially distant (Study 3). They were also less likely to extrapolate from specific cases that deviated from general trends when making predictions about more spatially distant events (Study 4). Implications for social judgment are discussed.