Spatial Thought, Social Thought Barbara Tversky 1 Abstract Spatial thought is not an internalized video of experience but rather a con- struction carved out of experience. Objects, categories, orderings: These constructive processes sharpen, level, add, subtract, simplify, complicate, and distort, not randomly, but in ways that contribute to sense-making. Parallel phenomena appear in social thought. For example, individuals are grouped into categories, and within-category differences are perceived as smaller than between-category differences. Categories are ordered into dimensions that are spatially arrayed from down to up and from left to right in western languages. These correspondences seem to arise from percep- tion-action couplings, and suggest that spatial cognition can serve as a basis for social thought. 1. Basic facts We can’t escape space. Our bodies take up space, perceive in space, and act in space. Our perceptions and our actions are constrained by space, the things in it, the forces acting in it, the changes in it. We begin to act in space and learn about space even before birth. All our senses participate in that learning, con- tributing to spatial knowledge. Spatial knowledge is supramodal, informed by vision, hearing, touch, kinesthesis, and more. It is essential to survival. If we didn’t know how to get food into our mouths and find our way home, sur- vival would be difficult. This does not mean that our spatial knowledge is perfect. On the contrary. Our spatial knowledge is constructed from ele- ————— 1 Gratitude to Thomas Schubert for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Preparation of this chapter and/or some of the research reported were supported by the following grants: NSF BNS 8002012, AFOSR 89- 0076, the Edinburgh-Stanford Link through the Center for the Study of Lan- guage and Information at Stanford University, Office of Naval Research Grants Number NOOO14-PP-1-O649, N000140110717, and N000140210534, NSF REC-0440103, NSF IIS-0725223, NSF IIS-0905417, NSF IIS-0855995 and the Stanford Regional Visualization and Analysis Center.