Brain-inspired representations of 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.