2009/02/09 by Yoshinori Yamakawa, Ryota Kanai, Michikazu Matsumura +1 · 1 citation
Psychology · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Action Observation and Synchronization #Categorization, perception, and language
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004360
openalex publication_date 2009/02/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. "close friends" "high lord"). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex's known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space.