Social spatial cognition: social distance dynamics as an identifier of social interactions
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Social spatial cognition: social distance dynamics as an identifier of social interactions Alex Dorfman1 · David Eilam1 Received: 29 June 2020 / Revised: 29 September 2020 / Accepted: 3 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Spatial cognition · Social cognition · Social distance · Proximity · Social interactions · Excursions
Introduction The social environment, like the physical environment, is encoded in the brain (Eichenbaum 2015; Tavares et al. 2015) and is involved in the formation of what is termed ’socio-spatial cognition’. It has been demonstrated that the interaction between the social and the physical environment significantly affects the behavioral output; namely: the presence of another individual causes a great change in spatial behavior (Dorfman et al. 2016). Individuals unfamiliar to each other tend to couple their locomotor behavior (Weiss et al. 2015), form groups (Weiss et al. 2018), and forage together (Weiss et al. 2017).
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01441-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * David Eilam [email protected] 1
School of Zoology, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat‑Aviv, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel
To study how the social environment shapes spatial cognition, we scrutinized the moment-to-moment structure of socio-spatial interactions utilizing the methodology used for studying spatio-temporal organization of behavior in reference to the physical environment. Specifically, spatial behavior of rodents is organized in reference to a hub (Gallistel 1989; Golledge 1999; Eilam and Blumenfeld-Liebertaha
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