Partnered sexual activity and satisfaction in women with spinal cord disease: influence of urinary incontinence and other predictors.

Space is a primary ecological currency. The spatial structure of our environments determines access to food, mates, and shelter while simultaneously shaping exposure to predation and other threats. Across species, evolutionary fitness depends on balancing these opportunities and risks across spatio-temporal scales, as captured by ethological and ecological frameworks such as “flight initiation distance“, “refuge use“, and “dynamic landscapes of fear“ (; ; ; ). These frameworks highlight that the value of a given location is not fixed but varies with distance to dynamic threats and resources, time to contact, and the actions available (i.e., affordances) at different spatial and temporal scales. Neural systems that encode space must therefore support behaviors across a diversity of spatiotemporal horizons (). One concerns the space immediately surrounding and adjacent to the body, where threats and afforded opportunities unfold within milliseconds and where action must often be reflexive. The other concerns the broader environment, which extends far beyond reach, where relevant events may be minutes or hours away, and where fitness depends on remembering locations, predicting future states, and evaluating alternative routes. Interestingly, these different spatial regimes seemingly have corresponding neural architectures: an egocentric, short-horizon encoding of peripersonal space (PPS) immediately adjacent to and surrounding the body (; ), and an allocentric, longer-horizon, world-centered cognitive map supporting navigation, memory, and planning (; ). In other words, PPS governs the “,” whereas para-hippocampal allocentric maps enable animals to reason about the “. Although these systems are often studied separately—PPS in classic macaque neurophysiology (e.g., ) and current cognitive neuroscience (e.g., ), and cognitive maps most commonly within rodent systems neuroscience ()—here we argue that they may be best understood together. We do not aim to provide a comprehensive review of either the PPS () or cognitive maps () literature. Instead, the novelty of this contribution is adapting an evolutionary lens in both these sub-fields, and examining how they may relate to one another. Indeed, throughout this piece, we develop an evolutionary argument to speculate on if and how these systems may share common principles and could reflect a scaffolded relationship. Importantly, the distinction between peri-personal versus extra-personal space on one hand, and egocentric versus allocentric reference frames on the other, are conceptually related but not equivalent. Indeed, distance from our bodies (i.e., peri- versus extra-personal space) is inherently sensed and defined in egocentric terms, such that egocentric coding spans both near and far spaces. By contrast, allocentric representations encode relationships between elements in the environment independent of the observer. As such, allocentric coding is not necessarily tied to a particular distance regime, but is most often particularly advantageous in extra-personal space, where evaluating distal, non-immediate, or counterfactual interactions between environmental elements becomes necessary. In what follows, we therefore may use the shorthand of linking allocentric coding with extra-personal space and egocentric coding with peri-personal space to describe dominant functional roles, but we must emphasize that this mapping is neither exclusive nor exhaustive.