Abstract: Humans constantly engage in automatic and rapid analysis of spatial scene structure
when navigating an environment or searching for objects. This chapter draws on current
research from computational, behavioral and neuroscience perspectives aimed at
understanding how the human brain perceives, represents, and remembers the shape of
space. Space can be described with both structural descriptions, which reflect layout of
surfaces in the physical world, and semantic descriptions, which incorporate an
observers understanding of the environment. We first review two formal approaches
which can quantify the structural properties of scene layout: the isovist representation
and the spatial envelope representation. Next we explore how space is experienced by
observers, by reviewing behavioral results in which different factors distort the perceived
space away from a veridical representation. Finally, we examine how representations of
specific views of space are maintained in memory, and discuss potential neural
mechanisms involved in integrating views into larger environments. Gaining a formal
understanding of how geometric aspects of space map onto human perceptual,
cognitive, and neural systems will help to create efficient functional spaces for our daily
interactions with the world.
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