ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2013
Old cortex, new contexts: re-purposing spatial perception for social cognition.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visuospatial perspective-taking in social-emotional development: enhancing young children's mind and emotion understanding via block building training.BMC psychology · 2022Trial
- The 3D Vertical Maze: A new model system for studying the interactions between social and spatial cognition.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2025Article
- Reward system atrophy relates to heightened feelings of physical closeness in Alzheimer's disease.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Processing of social closeness in the human brain.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Brain Structure and Optimism Bias: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Approach.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Fading boundaries between the physical and the social world: Insights and novel techniques from the intersection of these two fields.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Brain Coding of Social Network Structure.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Different neural activations for an approaching friend versus stranger: Linking personal space to numerical cognition.Brain and behavior · 2020Article
- Group membership dictates the neural correlates of social optimism biases.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- The spatial representation of power in children.Cognitive processing · 2017Article
- Brain system for mental orientation in space, time, and person.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Representational similarity of social and valence information in the medial pFC.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2015Article
- Neural substrates of social status inference: roles of medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2014Article
- A common cortical metric for spatial, temporal, and social distance.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2014Article
- Perspective taking: building a neurocognitive framework for integrating the "social" and the "spatial".Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Much of everyday mental life involves information that we cannot currently perceive directly, from contemplating the strengths of friendships to reasoning about the contents of other minds. Despite their primacy to everyday human functioning, and in particular, to human sociality, the mechanisms that support abstract thought are poorly understood. An explanatory framework that has gained traction recently in cognitive neuroscience is exaptation, or the re-purposing of evolutionarily old circuitry to carry out new functions. We argue for the utility of applying this concept to social cognition. Convergent behavioral and neuroscientific evidence suggests that humans co-opt mechanisms originally devoted to spatial perception for more abstract domains of cognition (e.g., temporal reasoning). Preliminary evidence suggests that some aspects of social cognition also involve the exaptation of substrates originally evolved for processing physical space. We discuss the potential for future work to test more directly if cortical substrates for spatial processing were exapted for social cognition, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of how humans evolved mechanisms for navigating an exceptionally complex social world.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.