Brain-inspired representations for urban space

Geography and neuroscience share a core interest in understanding human
behaviour in spatial environments. Yet, interdisciplinary collaboration is
often limited by differences in methodology and epistemological
assumptions. To help bridge this divide, we introduce a translational link
between cognitive models of spatial processing in neuroscience and
representations of geographic space. Building on long-standing theories
that the brain predicts possible futures, the predictive map hypothesis
suggests that locations in space are encoded according to their
association with possible locations in the future. Here, we adapt a formal
instantiation of this idea, the successor representation (SR), to urban
space resulting in the geographic successor representation (gSR). We show
that this cognitive model of geographic representation produces compelling
unique features of urban space while remaining closely aligned with brain
mechanisms of spatial processing. We outline several promising directions
for extending this work, and propose that the gSR and its variants may
provide spatial representations capable of supporting deeper integration
between geographic and neuroscientific research.