Spatial Contingencies Research Articles

Hippocampal-dependent navigation in head-fixed mice using a floating real-world environment

Head-fixation of mice enables high-resolution monitoring of neuronal activity coupled with precise control of environmental stimuli. Virtual reality can be used to emulate the visual experience of movement during head fixation, but a low inertia floating real-world environment (mobile homecage, MHC) has the potential to engage more sensory modalities and provide a richer experimental environment for complex behavioral tasks. However, it is not known whether mice react to this adapted environment in a similar manner to real environments, or whether the MHC can be used to implement validated, maze-based behavioral tasks. Here, we show that hippocampal place cell representations are intact in the MHC and that the system allows relatively long (20 min) whole-cell patch clamp recordings from dorsal CA1 pyramidal neurons, revealing sub-threshold membrane potential dynamics. Furthermore, mice learn the location of a liquid reward within an adapted T-maze guided by 2-dimensional spatial navigation cues and relearn the location when spatial contingencies are reversed. Bilateral infusions of scopolamine show that this learning is hippocampus-dependent and requires intact cholinergic signalling. Therefore, we characterize the MHC system as an experimental tool to study sub-threshold membrane potential dynamics that underpin complex navigation behaviors.

Wahala dey like wetin?: theorizing crisis in Nigerian cultural forms

As a peculiarly Nigerian valence of crisis and disorder ubiquitously referenced within cultural forms, the term Wahala offers an important vantage point for understanding contemporary narrativizations of crisis. This article takes the phrase Wahala dey like Bicycle, a slang expression popularized in the country in 2020, as a starting point from which to rethink crisis, chaos, and adversity as narrated in the Nigerian social imaginary. I argue that Wahala provides the conceptual hinge with which to theorize crisis, not only as a condition of social debilitation that pivots between disorder and agency, but also as an instrument of social mobility that derives from endemic disorder as its propellant. Placing this discursive idiom and its echoes in the Nigerian slang-scape in conversation with Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, I trace how it illuminates debilitations of endemic crisis, as well as the juncture of incapacitation, spatial contingencies, and agentic action that Nigerian subjects navigate within and transcend in their everyday lives through modes of improvisation. In mapping a geography of crisis, Soyinka’s novel demonstrates how endemic disorder and social unease manifest across the landscape in a conflict-prone social environment, allowing us to understand the itineraries of subjects who must invent meaning, control, and survival within such social geographies.

The influence of single-session reward-based attentional bias modification on attentional biases towards threat as measured by the N2pc component.

Attentional biases toward threatening faces have repeatedly been studied in the context of social anxiety, with etiological theories suggesting exacerbated biases as a possible cause for the latter. To counteract these postulated effects, research has focused on the concept of attentional bias manipulation (ABM), in which spatial contingencies between succeeding stimuli are traditionally employed in training paradigms designed to deliberately shift automatic attention processes away from threat-related stimuli. The ABM research field has been faced with various methodological challenges, such as inconsistent results, low reliabilities of dependent variables and a high susceptibility to moderating factors. We aimed to combine several recent approaches to address these issues. Drawing upon theories of value-driven attention, we explored reward-based contingencies in a Dot Probe task to improve the training's efficacy, combined with neurophysiological measures for greater reliability compared to reaction times, while evaluating the moderating effect of explicitness in the instruction. In a healthy sample (N = 60) and within a single session, we found a general attentional bias toward angry faces present across all conditions as indicated by the N2pc, which was, however, marked by large intrinsic lateralization effects, with submeasures exhibiting opposing polarities. This prompted us to explore an alternative, intrahemispheric calculation method. The new N2pc variant showed the attentional bias to have disappeared at the end of the training session within the explicit instruction group. Reliabilities of the main dependent variables were varied from excellent to questionable, which, together with the exploratory nature of the analysis, leaves this result as preliminary.

Multimodal methods for managing deontic rights in interdisciplinary trials

This paper focuses on interdisciplinary trials as a multiparty and multiactivity setting in which different professions are needed for students with mobility disabilities to try out robot-assisted gait training. Through an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to multimodal interaction analysis, we investigate how a research team collaborates with the employees at a sports high school to get students who are wheelchair users to walk. The paper provides an analysis of the professionals’ employment of multimodal resources for managing deontic rights when organizing interdisciplinary trials. It examines how the professionals initiate and negotiate their own and others’ actions necessary for preparing the student for walking. Based on video recordings, the paper focuses on the professionals’ deontic claims concerning co-participants’ actions and analyzes their temporal and spatial contingencies. Building on prior research on deontics, this paper contributes to our understanding of the interactive accomplishment of deontic authority and its sensitivity to contextual features.

Manifold Spaces and Patterned Potentialities

The research aims at providing a new perspective and methodology to dynamic space setting as a mode articulation for intensity, transformation, and change pointing to more versatile, resilient, and ecological urban assemblages. The anticipation apparatus proposed for architecture and the city is a landscape of Alexandrian Design Patterns and intensive variables that simulates spatial contingencies and connects them with actual bodies as an extended mode of prediction and design. The city is represented as an N-dimensional manifold, a plane of variable dimensionality where its dimensions are used to represent its sociospatial becomings. At the same time, the manifold itself becomes the space of possible states that city can have, an apparatus that structures the city’s sociospatial potentialities and dynamically patterns its material reality.

Local knowledge spillovers and innovation persistence of firms

ABSTRACT Innovation activities of firms tend to be highly persistent. Yet, little is still known about potential spatial contingencies affecting the degree of persistence. This paper analyses the influence of local knowledge spillovers on firms’ persistence in innovation activities. Using a representative panel data set of firms in Germany from 2002 to 2016, complemented by detailed geographic information of patent activity over discrete distances to proxy local knowledge spillovers, we find that the local patenting activity positively moderates persistency in innovation activities. Estimations with different distance bands show that the strength of knowledge spillovers that contribute to innovation persistence attenuates with increasing distance and vanishes beyond 30 kilometres in manufacturing and beyond 20 kilometres in services.

Exploring students' feelings of place

Geographically unequal distribution of opportunities for participation in post-school education particularly affects young people in rural and regional areas of Australia. This study contends that the perception of opportunities by young people from low socio-economic status backgrounds should be considered alongside the distribution of opportunities, in order to understand how place and social mobility are intertwined in the reproduction of inequality. Drawing on data about post-school transitions in peri-urban and rural areas of Australia, our study shows that understandings of a sense of belonging to a rural place of origin and the attraction of nature and the outdoors are intrinsic to understanding young people's educational mobilities. Despite a growing interest in the more emotional aspects of mobility, including the concept of 'emotional topographies' and issues of dislocation and belonging, the spatial contingency of student identities and their effects on participation are only just beginning to be manifested in an ontological shift in scholarship. Educational mobilities and the sense of place have been tested by the impact of the 2020 global pandemic. By deepening understanding of how students from rural areas frame their educational choices, this study offers a progression in thinking about dislocation and belonging in the interactions of post-school transitions. Arguably, a broader emotional geographical sense of belonging is needed to understand the experiences of rural students and their mobility or immobility. This broader conceptualisation may indicate new research directions for urban research.

Vestibular Stimulation May Drive Multisensory Processing: Principles for Targeted Sensorimotor Therapy (TSMT).

At birth, the vestibular system is fully mature, whilst higher order sensory processing is yet to develop in the full-term neonate. The current paper lays out a theoretical framework to account for the role vestibular stimulation may have driving multisensory and sensorimotor integration. Accordingly, vestibular stimulation, by activating the parieto-insular vestibular cortex, and/or the posterior parietal cortex may provide the cortical input for multisensory neurons in the superior colliculus that is needed for multisensory processing. Furthermore, we propose that motor development, by inducing change of reference frames, may shape the receptive field of multisensory neurons. This, by leading to lack of spatial contingency between formally contingent stimuli, may cause degradation of prior motor responses. Additionally, we offer a testable hypothesis explaining the beneficial effect of sensory integration therapies regarding attentional processes. Key concepts of a sensorimotor integration therapy (e.g., targeted sensorimotor therapy (TSMT)) are also put into a neurological context. TSMT utilizes specific tools and instruments. It is administered in 8-weeks long successive treatment regimens, each gradually increasing vestibular and postural stimulation, so sensory-motor integration is facilitated, and muscle strength is increased. Empirically TSMT is indicated for various diseases. Theoretical foundations of this sensorimotor therapy are discussed.

A Place-Based Approach to Sustainable Communities: A Case Study from Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile)

The failure to account for temporal and spatial contingencies leads to attempts to apply universals to the needs and constraints of communities that may or may not be appropriate. Here, we argue that taking a place-based approach offers a way of incorporating local context to solve issues of sustainability at the scale of communities. We demonstrate this approach with Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), a famous Polynesian island often associated with arguments for non-sustainability. Through detailed analyses of the island’s historical context and interviews with present-day governance leaders, we draw three conclusions. First, culture, governance, economy, environment, and equity, often described as “pillars” of sustainability, are inseparable and therefore better described as dimensions of sustainability. These factors are part of the place in which sustainable communities exist and must be integrated into analyses. Second, our findings demonstrate that we must adopt standards for sustainable communities that can change through time. What would have been considered sustainable in prehistoric times is no longer considered sustainable today. Third, globalization can be viewed as a driving force behind these changing views of sustainability. Furthermore, globalization has had both positive (e.g. access to health, education, and economic resources) and negative (e.g. threat to a culture of sustainability) impacts on Rapa Nui.

Assessing the Differential Impact of Vacancy on Criminal Violence in the City of St. Louis, MO

This study employs risk terrain modeling to identify the spatial correlates of aggravated assault and homicide in St. Louis, MO. We build upon the empirical literature by (1) replicating recent research examining the role of vacancy in the concentration of criminal violence and (2) examining whether the environmental correlates of violence vary between north and south St. Louis, a boundary that has long divided the city along racial and socioeconomic lines. Our results indicate that vacancy presents a strong, consistent risk for both homicide and aggravated assault and that this pattern emerges most clearly in the northern part of the city which is majority African American and has suffered chronic disinvestment. The concentration of criminal violence in South City is driven primarily by public hubs including housing, transportation, and schools. Our results underscore the importance of vacancy as a driver of the spatial concentration of violent crime and point to potential heterogeneity in risk terrain modeling results when applied to large metropolitan areas. Situational crime prevention strategies would be well served to consider such spatial contingencies as the risk factors driving violent crime are neither uniformly distributed across space nor uniform in their impact on criminal violence.

Spatial encoding in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus is related during deliberation.

Deliberation is thought to involve the internal simulation of the outcomes of candidate actions, the valuation of those outcomes, and the selection of the actions with the highest expected value. While it is known that deliberation involves prefrontal cortical areas, specifically the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), as well as the hippocampus (HPC) and other brain regions, how these areas process prospective information and select actions is not well understood. We recorded simultaneously from ensembles in dmPFC and CA1 of dorsal HPC in rats during performance of a spatial contingency switching task, and examined the relationships between spatial and reward encoding in these two areas during deliberation at the choice point. We found that CA1 and dmPFC represented either goal locations or the current position simultaneously, but that when goal locations were encoded, HPC and dmPFC did not always represent the same goal location. Ensemble activity in dmPFC predicted when HPC would represent goal locations, but on a broad timescale on the order of seconds. Also, reward encoding in dmPFC increased during hippocampal theta cycles where CA1 ensembles represented the goal location. These results suggest that dmPFC and HPC share prospective information during deliberation, that dmPFC may influence whether HPC represents prospective information, and that information recalled about goal locations by HPC may be integrated into dmPFC reward representations on fast timescales.

Authorizing geographical knowledge: John Arrowsmith, mapmaking and the mid nineteenth-century British Empire

This article examines how the prominent mapmaker, engraver and publisher John Arrowsmith (1790–1873) functioned as a geographical authority in the mid nineteenth-century British Empire. Through previously unexamined archival material I analyse Arrowsmith’s close relationship with the Colonial Office and consider his semi-official position as a mapmaker to the British Empire. I analyse Arrowsmith’s cartographic credibility and the power of maps through a case study focusing on Australind, a private colonization venture targeted at Western Australia in 1840. I analyse the ‘social life’ of a map Arrowsmith supplied for the Western Australian Company largely based on explorer George Grey’s information by examining its contested epistemological status in the Australian colonies. Using literature on trust, authority and the social histories of maps, this article highlights the mutability and spatial contingency of the power of maps and their makers in imperial and colonial knowledge-making. By studying the map’s shifting position in the processes of truth-making in the metropolis and the Australian colonies I contribute to growing literature on the processual nature of maps. Importantly, I demonstrate how maps like Arrowsmith’s not only contributed to the popular imagination of empire at home but were documents of indirect agency as the British invaded and explored different parts of the world.

Firescapes of disruption: An absence of insurance in landscapes of fire

In this paper, I critically interrogate the expectation that insurance is becoming more present through the processes of financialisation and marketisation – as up-to-date policies and/or in the hearts and minds of consumers. I draw upon interviews about house and contents insurance, with householders in the flammable landscapes of south-eastern Tasmania, Australia. The participants identify these landscapes as resilient and permanent and thus ultimately unaffected by fire. In understanding bush-living as co-constituted with fire and not purely threatened by fire, they experience a strong sense of continuance in these places. In this context, the promise of insurance emerges as contingent, and even if an up-to-date policy is present, insurance moves in and out of focus, is present and becomes absent as various human and non-human actants exert agency. Drawing on critical landscape studies in exploring these spatial contingencies, I observe insuring as landscaping practice. As well as contributing to critical insurance studies and financialisation of everyday life research, I provide a signpost for rethinking the role of insurance in disaster management and climate adaptation.

Energy periphery: Uneven development and the precarious geographies of low-carbon transition

The paper introduces the concept of energy periphery to interrogate place-based perspectives on the co-production of uneven geographical development, energy vulnerabilities and low carbon transitions. Energy periphery is defined as places that are systematically disadvantaged through the whole energy system due to their inferior position within the asymmetrical spatial distribution of economic, political and symbolic resources and capabilities. Within an energy periphery, energy-related factors are combined with other place-based conditions to subject their communities to a compound and circular effect of precarious energy experiences. The notion of energy periphery is underpinned by insights from the spatial justice, core-periphery and energy justice theories. Using the case of Wales, the paper demonstrates the multi-dimensional and multi-scalar character of energy peripheralisation, including political underrepresentation, the absence of economic agglomeration advantages, and dependence on off-grid fuels, energy inefficient homes and other ‘backward’ technologies and practices. Social and spatial contingencies of energy vulnerability factors are outlined. Contrary to common discourses, energy transition further disadvantages energy peripheries and reproduces a fragmented socio-spatial landscape. The study overall demonstrates the importance of considering energo-socio-spatial relationships to better understand uneven energy transitions and social change more generally.

Gender, class, race, ethnicity and power in an elite girls’ state school

Selective state grammar schools are the subject of sustained political debate surrounding issues of standards, education quality and social mobility, and yet they have received little academic scrutiny in geographies of education. Increasing numbers of young people are educated in selective settings in both the UK and globally. In this paper, we argue that some selective state schools are ‘elite’ spaces, whose alumni hold disproportionate power and sway. This paper examines the social geographies of girls in an elite grammar school in the Southeast of England, examining how classed and ethnic/racialized femininities are performed and enacted. The data are drawn from semi-structured photo-interviews and focus groups with 23 girls aged 13–14. The paper examines how the girls’ social geographies were forged by socio-psychic process of connection and differentiation. Class differences were abjected onto non-grammar school ‘others’, and poverty was viewed by some girls as a moral failing. The girls were avowedly open to ethnic, racial and religious diversity, which generated a cosmopolitan sensibility as a cultural resource. Nonetheless, subtle differences were reproduced through friendships, which along with being emotionally nurturing, were fraught and fractured in power. These differences can involve subtle hierarchical performances of ethnicity/region/race, which operated beyond the immediate conscious reflection of the girls at times, pointing to a ‘deeper domain’ (Philo and Parr, 2003) which can be a friction to allenging enduring relations of difference through the spatial contingency of encounter. Given the powerful positions these girls are likely to occupy in top professions, how they understand and perform class, gender, ethnicity/race and religion are crucial. This in-depth study has theoretical resonance to elite spaces beyond the specific context of the case-study school by illuminating processes through which specific and hierarchical subjectivities are forged in friendships and by identifying the ‘same’ and ‘other’.

Story of the Eastern Chamber: Dilemmas of Vernacular Language and Political Authority in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn

Abstract The earliest extant playscript in Korea stands as an enigma. It is an anonymous work written to celebrate a wedding arranged by King Chŏngjo. Called Story of the Eastern Chamber, the play evokes not only the Chinese Story of the Western Chamber through titular reference but also the Chinese vernacular tradition as a whole. Written entirely in Chinese characters, the text weaves vernacular Korean words into the syntax of Chinese baihua vernacular, an unusual form which upsets the conventional diglossic binary of literary Chinese (hanmun) and vernacular Korean (hangŭl). This essay situates the text in a late Chosŏn discourse of linguistic difference marked by pronounced anxieties about the temporal and spatial contingency of language. Some late Chosŏn writers, including the text’s putative author, Yi Ok, embraced difference to carve out a localized literary space in Chosŏn Korea. For King Chŏngjo, it threatened the textual foundation of royal authority. Eastern Chamber spoke to these dilemmas by imagining a linguistic space where vernacular Korean usage could be represented as a literary language in the Chinese script, reconciling kingly authority with local specificity.

Neuronal evidence for good-based economic decisions under variable action costs

Previous work showed that economic decisions can be made independently of spatial contingencies. However, when goods available for choice bear different action costs, the decision necessarily reflects aspects of the action. One possibility is that “stimulus values” are combined with the corresponding action costs in a motor representation, and decisions are then made in actions space. Alternatively, action costs could be integrated with other determinants of value in a non-spatial representation. If so, decisions under variable action costs could take place in goods space. Here, we recorded from orbitofrontal cortex while monkeys chose between different juices offered in variable amounts. We manipulated action costs by varying the saccade amplitude, and we dissociated in time and space offer presentation from action planning. Neurons encoding the binary choice outcome did so well before the presentation of saccade targets, indicating that decisions were made in goods space.

Business services and the financing of global production networks: the case of global law firms in Southeast Asia

AbstractFinancial and business services (FABSs) as intermediaries play a significant role in global production networks (GPNs). Yet, the mechanisms through which they influence the activities of lead and supplier firms in GPNs have received little in-depth attention. This article addresses the shortcoming and examines how global legal business services configure the financial discipline of transnational corporations (TNCs) in Southeast Asia. It documents the way FABS articulate financial imperatives and encourages the reproduction of ‘global financial architectures’. It also shows, however, that temporal dynamics and spatial specificities in the power relations between FABS and TNCs generate variegated financial configurations. Southeast Asian TNCs adopt and adapt in ways that serve their interests. This implies that the governance effects of FABS have important temporal and spatial contingencies that need to be accounted for in analyses of GPNs.

Flexible coupling of covert spatial attention and motor planning based on learned spatial contingencies.

The present study tested whether the coupling of covert attentional shifts and motor planning of pointing movements can be modulated by learning. Participants performed two tasks. As a primary movement task, they executed a pointing movement to a movement target (MT) location. As a secondary visual attention task, they identified a discrimination target (DT) that was presented shortly before initiation of the pointing movement. These DTs either occurred at the same or at different locations with the MT. A common finding in such and similar settings is the enhanced visual target identification when locations of MT and DT coincide. However, it is not known which factors govern the flexibility of spatial attention-action coupling. Here, we tested the influence of previously learned spatial contingencies between MT and DT on the coupling of covert attention and motor planning. These contingencies were manipulated in three groups (always same locations, always opposite locations, non-contingent locations) in a training session. Results indicated that in a subsequent test phase, previously learned contingencies enhanced visual identification accordingly, even when targets for the movement task and the visual task were presented at opposite sides. These results corroborate previous findings of a rather flexible interaction of attention and motor planning, and demonstrate how one can learn to control attention by means of motor planning.

Spatiotemporal arrangement of objects in activities with people with dementia

Purpose: This study shows how the spatial organization of objects and their use may impact locally produced order of activities and how that can affect the accomplishment of everyday activities by people with dementia.Methods: The study is based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis of eight and a half hours of video recordings in three different settings. Eighteen sequences of activities identified were multimodally transcribed and analyzed.Results: The availability or non-availability of objects, their arrangements and manipulations play a crucial role in the management of the order of activities and may present both challenges and facilitations for people with dementia. The organizations of objects directly influence the order of the activity, and the objects’ potential use may afford actions that deviate from the trajectory and the order of the main activity.Conclusions: One of the significant uses of objects is how they contribute to the perceptual field where attention is organized for building actions. Participants in activities modify the perceptual field by manipulating objects in the material surrounds in response to the relevancies resulting from the unfolding activities. Therefore, spatial contingency is significant in the accomplishment of activities by people with dementia. As it is not self-evident that verbal instructions may result in the instructed actions accordingly, the rearrangement of objects and making them timely available to people with dementia may increase the possibilities of keeping the order of the activities intact.