How did brains come to represent space?
Our brains support at least two ways of representing space. One is peripersonal space: a fast, body-centred map of the zone immediately around us, where threats and opportunities unfold within milliseconds and action is often reflexive. The other is the cognitive map: a slower, world-centred system that lets us navigate, remember places, and plan routes over horizons far beyond arm's reach. Peripersonal space governs the "here and now"; the cognitive map lets us reason about the "there and then."
These two systems are usually studied in isolation — peripersonal space in primate and human neuroscience, cognitive maps largely in rodents. In a new perspective in Progress in Neurobiology, Summbla Anjum, Maria J. Sosa, Andrea Serino and SCENE PI Jean-Paul Noel argue that they are best understood together, through an evolutionary lens.
They sketch a path across roughly 600 million years. It begins with the origin of bilateral symmetry, which gave animals a front and a back and, with it, the first egocentric sense of "ahead" and "behind" — the scaffold for a proto-peripersonal system that predicts imminent contact. The move from water to land then dramatically expanded sensory range: seeing tens or hundreds of metres instead of a few body-lengths created pressure for longer-horizon navigation and planning, plausibly seeding hippocampal cognitive maps. Later still, the stereoscopic vision and manual dexterity of primates drove a cortical peripersonal system supporting reaching, grasping, tool use, and social interaction.
The key claim is that these systems did not evolve independently — they scaffolded one another, and were repeatedly repurposed. The near-body system expanded from crude fight-or-flight responses toward fine sensorimotor control and social cognition; the mapping system expanded beyond navigation toward relational, conceptual, and abstract thought. Drawing on recent reinforcement-learning ideas that link body-centred and world-centred predictions of value, the authors propose that both systems share computational principles, operating at different spatial and temporal scales. The picture that emerges is of cognition growing outward — from near-body safety to a multiscale predictive architecture for flexible, goal-directed behaviour across space and time.
Read the full paper: From peripersonal space to cognitive maps: An evolutionary perspective (Anjum, Sosa, Serino & Noel, Progress in Neurobiology, 2026) — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2026.102922