Spatial Context Effects Research Articles

Geographies of socio-economic inequality

Abstract Over many decades, academics, policymakers, and governments have been concerned with both the presence of inequalities and the impacts these can have on people when concentrated spatially in urban areas. This concern is especially related to the influence of spatial inequalities on individual outcomes in terms of health, education, work and income, and general well-being amongst other outcomes. In this commentary, we provide an overview of the literature on spatial inequalities and on contextual and neighbourhood effects. We address some of the main challenges in modelling contextual effects and provide evidence that no single study can definitively provide the answer to the question whether—and how much—spatial context effects are relevant for understanding individual outcomes. It is only when taken together that the rich body of research on spatial context effects shows convincingly that spatial context effects are relevant. The commentary ends with the presentation of the vicious circle of the segregation model and suggest some ways in which this vicious circle of spatial inequality and segregation can be broken.

A multiscale examination of heat health risk inequality and its drivers in mega-urban agglomeration: A case study in the Yangtze River Delta, China

Increased frequency of extreme urban heat and its exposure to urban populations is one of the challenges presented by climate change, especially in urban clusters. Due to the rapid but unequal development, heat exposure disproportionately increased in the underdeveloped regions compared to the developed regions in urban agglomeration. To address this issue, it is crucial to clarify the spatial pattern of heat health risk (HHR) inequality for urban heat resilience. However, analyses for the disparity of HHR inequality often used a single scale, neglecting important spatial context effects at other scales. Moreover, the rationale of HHR inequality remains unclear. Here, we took the well-developed and highly urbanized Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region as a case study and employed multiscale approaches to examine how and why the HHR inequality varied at and within the regional scale. We first assessed HHR using a comprehensive assessment framework at a 1 km grid level. Then, we quantified the inequality between regions using local Moran's I and KS distance. Therefore, we utilized the Gini coefficient and Bayes quantile regression to quantify inequality and identify its drivers within the regional scale. Finally, we proposed a conceptual framework to inform policymaking in regions with different patterns of multiscale equality. Our results found that the HHR in YRD exhibited significant spatial inequality at the regional scale (Moran's I = 0.562, P < 0.001) and within the regional scale (Gini coefficient: 0.27–0.54). Higher population concentrations and building densities often led to higher HHR. In high HHR areas, intra-regional inequality was often lower due to high and coordinated socioeconomic levels (Gini coefficient: 0.27–0.34). Additionally, in areas with low and medium levels of risk, healthcare resource availability and local temperatures had a greater impact on intra-regional inequities, which varied at different levels of inequality. This study contributes to a better understanding of multiscale HHR inequality, which helps optimize heat risk management strategies and regional sustainable development.

Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment. What matters more: Exposure to poverty or exposure to affluence?

Neighbourhood effects studies typically investigate the negative effects on individual outcomes of living in areas with concentrated poverty. The literature rarely pays attention to the potential beneficial effects of living in areas with concentrated affluence. This poverty paradigm might hinder our understanding of spatial context effects. Our paper uses individual geocoded data from the Netherlands to compare the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty on educational attainment within the same statistical models. Using bespoke neighbourhoods, we create individual neighbourhood histories which allow us to distinguish exposure effects from early childhood and adolescence. We follow an entire cohort born in 1995 and we measure their educational level in 2018. The results show that, in the Netherlands, neighbourhood affluence has a stronger effect on educational attainment than neighbourhood poverty for all the time periods studied. Additionally, interactions with parental education indicate that children with higher educated parents are not affected by neighbourhood poverty. These results highlight the need for more studies on the effects of concentrated affluence and can inspire anti-segregation policies.

Where Do Neighborhood Effects End? Moving to Multiscale Spatial Contextual Effects

There is no theoretical reason to assume that neighborhood effects operate at a constant single spatial scale across multiple urban settings or over different periods of time. Despite this, many studies use large, single-scale, predefined spatial units as proxies for neighborhoods. Recently, the use of bespoke neighborhoods has challenged the predominant approach to neighborhood as a single static unit. This article argues that we need to move away from neighborhood effects and study multiscale context effects. The article systematically examines how estimates of spatial contextual effects vary when altering the spatial scale of context, how this translates across urban space, and what the consequences are when using an inappropriate scale, in the absence of theory. Using individual-level geocoded data from The Netherlands, we created 101 bespoke areas around each individual. We ran 101 models of personal income to examine the effect of living in a low-income spatial context, focusing on four distinct regions. We found that contextual effects vary over both scales and urban settings, with the largest effects not necessarily present at the smallest spatial scale. Ultimately, the magnitude of contextual effects is determined by various spatial processes, along with the variability in urban structure. Therefore, using an inappropriate spatial scale can considerably bias (upward or downward) spatial context effects.

A new visual illusion of aspect-ratio context

Perception of local properties of the visual field is influenced by aftereffects of adaptation. The tilt aftereffect describes repulsion of the perceived orientation of a line from the orientation of an adapting line. Analogous effects of spatial context are often called illusions. Repulsion of the perceived orientation of a grating from the orientation of a surrounding grating is referred to as the tilt illusion. In the same manner, the size aftereffect and Ebbinghaus illusion form a complementary pair of temporal and spatial context effects of size. Here we report psychophysical evidence for a previously unknown aspect-ratio illusion which causes the perceived aspect-ratio of a rectangle to be repelled from the aspect-ratio of rectangles surrounding it. This illusion provides a spatial analogue to the aspect-ratio aftereffect.

Normalized value coding explains dynamic adaptation in the human valuation process

The notion of subjective value is central to choice theories in ecology, economics, and psychology, serving as an integrated decision variable by which options are compared. Subjective value is often assumed to be an absolute quantity, determined in a static manner by the properties of an individual option. Recent neurobiological studies, however, have shown that neural value coding dynamically adapts to the statistics of the recent reward environment, introducing an intrinsic temporal context dependence into the neural representation of value. Whether valuation exhibits this kind of dynamic adaptation at the behavioral level is unknown. Here, we show that the valuation process in human subjects adapts to the history of previous values, with current valuations varying inversely with the average value of recently observed items. The dynamics of this adaptive valuation are captured by divisive normalization, linking these temporal context effects to spatial context effects in decision making as well as spatial and temporal context effects in perception. These findings suggest that adaptation is a universal feature of neural information processing and offer a unifying explanation for contextual phenomena in fields ranging from visual psychophysics to economic choice.

A Spatial-Context Effect in Recognition Memory.

We designed a novel experiment to investigate the modulation of human recognition memory by environmental context. Human participants were asked to navigate through a four-arm Virtual Reality (VR) maze in order to find and memorize discrete items presented at specific locations in the environment. They were later on tested on their ability to recognize items as previously presented or new. By manipulating the spatial position of half of the studied items during the testing phase of our experiment, we could assess differences in performance related to the congruency of environmental information at encoding and retrieval. Our results revealed that spatial context had a significant effect on the quality of memory. In particular, we found that recognition performance was significantly better in trials in which contextual information was congruent as opposed to those in which it was different. Our results are in line with previous studies that have reported spatial-context effects in recognition memory, further characterizing their magnitude under ecologically valid experimental conditions.

A Functional MRI Index of Spatial Context Effects in Vision

Coordination of brain activity, in the form of modulation of feedforward activity by stored information and expectations, occurs across domains of perception and cognition. A reliable and compelling example of this is size contrast in vision. This paper builds on a prior study to show that in healthy humans, the spread of activation in striate and extrastriate visual cortex during a context-modulated size perception task is dependent on the perceived size of the target image, not on the physical size of the retinal image. These data provide further evidence that early regions in visual cortex are modulated by top-down influences, and provide a framework for investigating visual context processing in psychiatric disorders where reduced sensitivity to visual contextual effects has been demonstrated in behavioral tasks.

Are Urbanites More Permissive? Germany’s Urban Geography of Prejudice

Traditionally, bowing to the migration history of Germany, larger proportions of foreigners live in major German cities than in other parts of the country. According to contact theory, famously developed by social psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1950s, intergroup contacts between different ethnic groups reduce prejudice. The main aim of the article is to examine whether the level of prejudice toward foreigners is lower among the German urban population due to greater contact opportunities and habituation among different ethnic groups in Germany’s major cities, which reduces prejudice as well. The presented findings show, first, that prejudice is only slightly lower in the major cities. Second, this finding crucially depends on the quality of contacts. Only friendships between Germans and foreigners show a significant impact on reducing prejudice. Clearly, beyond the level of acquaintance with individual members of an out-group, only voluntary contacts are able to diminish prejudice. Third, in terms of spatial context effects, the switch between majority and minority group positions in residential areas appears to be a tipping point for prejudice, which means that even people with low levels of prejudice wish to live as the ethnic majority in their respective residential area.

Automobile Reliance Among the Elderly: Race and Spatial Context Effects

Abstract Mobility is a necessary condition for the social and emotional well‐being of older people. To meet their mobility needs, the elderly assign pivotal importance to the automobile despite the potential challenge of driving cessation and searching for alternatives to automobile transportation. Older persons’ generally strong reliance on the automobile varies, however, by land use patterns (density) as well as by demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. This paper analyzes the effects of spatial context and personal attributes on automobile reliance among the elderly. Using the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS) trip data, two models of automobile reliance among elderly (65+) trip makers are estimated. The results show that spatial context effects of automobile reliance vary by demographic characteristics; in particular, they are more pronounced for black than for white elderly. Moreover, race variation in automobile reliance is strongest in urban locations rather than less dense spatial contexts. Finally, the differentiation between being a passenger rather than a driver is salient in order to understand locational and racial variations in automobile reliance among the elderly.

Spatial context effects on visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) in schizophrenia

Spatial context effects on visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) in schizophrenia