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Even in our highly interconnected modern world, geographic factors play an important role in human social connections. Similarly, social relationships influence how and where we travel, and how we think about our spatial world. Here, we review the growing body of neuroscience research that is revealing multiple interactions between social and spatial processes in both humans and non-human animals. We review research on the cognitive and neural representation of spatial and social information, and highlight recent findings suggesting that underlying mechanisms might be common to both. We discuss how spatial factors can influence social behaviour, and how social concepts modify representations of space. In so doing, this review elucidates not only how neural representations of social and spatial information interact but also similarities in how the brain represents and operates on analogous information about its social and spatial surroundings. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The spatial–social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration’.
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Expanding theory, methodology and empirical systems at the spatial–social interface
All animals exhibit some combination of spatial and social behaviours. A diversity of interactions occurs between such behaviours, producing emergent phenomena atthe spatial–social interface. Untangling and interrogating these complex, intertwined processes can be vital for identifying the mechanisms, causes and consequences of behavioural variation in animal ecology. Nevertheless, the integrated study of the interactions between spatial and social phenotypes and environments (at the spatial–social interface) is in its relative infancy. In this theme issue, we present a collection of papers chosen to expand the spatial–social interface along several theoretical, methodological and empirical dimensions. They detail new perspectives, methods, study systems and more, as well as offering roadmaps for applied outputs and detailing exciting new directions for the field to move in the future. In this Introduction, we outline the contents of these papers, placing them in the context of what comes before, and we synthesize a number of takeaways and future directions for the spatial–social interface. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The spatial–social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration’.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2515340
- PAR ID:
- 10595260
- Publisher / Repository:
- Royal Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Volume:
- 379
- Issue:
- 1912
- ISSN:
- 0962-8436
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0534
