Been thinking about personal space given recommendations for increasing it to 2 meters -- and this paper by @AleAliSousa and others came to mind: How do we perceive interpersonal distance if there is a glass barrier? frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
Of course if it were not transparent, you might not even know someone is there unless the barrier is small and you can detect them with another sense. But the distance we are comfortable with does seem like it should be somewhat smaller with a barrier -- maybe not face-to-face!
Non-human animals show this too -- as seen at a number of zoos where a number of other great apes will come up close and interact at a transparent barrier
I collaborated with Achille Pasqualotto and others looking at how spatial cognition changes as a function of visual impairment -- with a bias for egocentric reference frames for those born blind vs allocentric for those with visual experience...
So with @AleAliSousa we became interested in a lot of research looking at links between social and spatial cognition, particularly research by @AmyLynne501 finding a link between social and spatial savvy ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21787102
Teaming up with @OrlinTSH @AleAliSousa and philosopher Amanda Taylor Aiken, we looked at this broader area of work in "Where am I? Who am I? The relation between spatial cognition, social cognition and individual differences in the built environment" frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
That was a challenging but rewarding paper to write, and it covers a lot of ground -- the social-spatial connection has led to our theoretically-informed applied research on the psychology of architecture, specifically on personal space and the workplace
This is ongoing work that @AleAliSousa and I have with great collaborators like @Paradise81_C and Ruth Hynes at @atkinsglobal summarised here for @ConsciousCities theccd.org/article/the-ps… using #VR to create virtual offices
I originally thought that these studies were most relevant for making design decisions with physical workplaces, but -- back to my first tweet -- with personal space being a focus for me and many others today, maybe virtual workspaces are the next social/spatial challenge?
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