Embodiment in Affective Space: Social Influences on Spatial Perception

Unlike social judgments, perceptual judgments are anchored in concrete reality and should not depend on social context. However, recent research suggests that perceptions of physical space can depend on social and emotional considerations. In contrast to theoretical approaches that view visual perception as a low-level process that is entirely independent of situational constraints, many studies support the notion that visual perception takes place in an “embodied” fashion, because people perceive the physical world around them as a function of how they would act in that world. This chapter reviews the influence of social and emotional factors in research involving maps and other conceptual representations of space, and in research involving the perception of distances and inclines. The reviewed findings provide a glimpse of how social factors influence basic cognitive processes previously assumed to be insulated from such influences.