ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
A common cortical metric for spatial, temporal, and social distance.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The Elephant in the Room: A Systematic Review of Stimulus Control in Neuro-Measurement Studies on Figurative Language Processing.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Seeking the "Beauty Center" in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Psychological distance intervention reminders reduce alcohol consumption frequency in daily life.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- The emergence of egocentric biases when comparing others is independent of whether groups or individuals are being compared.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Context-dependent abstraction of temporal relationships during naturalistic episodic memory.iScience · 2026Article
- Robust representation of the spatial arrangement of topological features.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Intention/Reflection (I/R) Practice Creates a Deeper APPE Connection for Student Pharmacists After COVID-19.Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Distinctive places make memories stick.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Neural Representation of Episodic Time.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neural systems for processing social relationship information along two principal dimensions.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Emotion Regulation is Associated with Increases in Linguistic Measures of Both Psychological Distancing and Abstractness.Affective science · 2025Article
- Reward system atrophy relates to heightened feelings of physical closeness in Alzheimer's disease.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Travelling beyond time: shared brain system for self-projection in the temporal, political and moral domains.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Interactions between neural representations of the social and spatial environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Processing of social closeness in the human brain.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The neural representation of stereotype content.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Effects of the perceived temporal distance of events on mental time travel and on its underlying brain circuits.Experimental brain research · 2024Article
- Altered grid-like coding in early blind people.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Inhibiting responses under the watch of a recently synchronized peer increases self-monitoring: evidence from functional near-infrared spectroscopy.Open biology · 2024Article
- Mental search of concepts is supported by egocentric vector representations and restructured grid maps.Nature communications · 2023Article
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Distance describes more than physical space: we speak of close friends and distant relatives, and of the near future and distant past. Did these ubiquitous spatial metaphors arise in language coincidentally or did they arise because they are rooted in a common neural computation? To address this question, we used statistical pattern recognition techniques to analyze human fMRI data. First, a machine learning algorithm was trained to discriminate patterns of fMRI responses based on relative egocentric distance within trials from one distance domain (e.g., photographs of objects relatively close to or far away from the viewer in spatial distance trials). Next, we tested whether the decision boundary generated from this training could distinguish brain responses according to relative egocentric distance within each of two separate distance domains (e.g., phrases referring to the immediate or more remote future within temporal distance trials; photographs of participants' friends or acquaintances within social distance trials). This procedure was repeated using all possible combinations of distance domains for training and testing the classifier. In all cases, above-chance decoding across distance domains was possible in the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Furthermore, the representational similarity structure within this brain area reflected participants' own judgments of spatial distance, temporal soon-ness, and social familiarity. Thus, the right IPL may contain a parsimonious encoding of proximity to self in spatial, temporal, and social frames of reference.
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Registered trials
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