AUTHOR=Gross Elizabeth B., Proffitt Dennis TITLE=The economy of social resources and its influence on spatial perceptions JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience VOLUME=7 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00772 DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2013.00772 ISSN=1662-5161 ABSTRACT=

Survival for any organism, including people, is a matter of resource management. To ensure survival, people necessarily budget their resources. Spatial perceptions contribute to resource budgeting by scaling the environment to an individual’s available resources. Effective budgeting requires setting a balance of income and expenditures around some baseline value. For social resources, this baseline assumes that the individuals are embedded in their social network. A review of the literature supports the proposal that our visual perceptions vary based on the implicit budgeting of physical and social resources, where social resources, as they fluctuate relative to a baseline, can directly alter our visual perceptions.