• Humans have a tendency to use spatial structure to organize knowledge across domains. • Spatial scaffolding represents concrete and abstract information and sequences. • Spatial scaffolding may enhance learning, memory, and knowledge use. • This capacity emerges early and shapes how abstract knowledge is reasoned. • As spatial skills develop, they support and may be essential for abstract thought. Humans appear to rely on spatial mental structures across a wide range of cognitive domains—from reasoning about quantity and serial order to recalling events in episodic memory. While individual domains such as number, language, or memory have been associated with spatial representations, we propose a broader hypothesis: that humans possess an innate predisposition to use mental space as a foundational structuring format. We argue that this spatial scaffolding supports the organization of both concrete and abstract information, including continua (e.g., magnitude), ordered sequences (e.g., rules), and event order (e.g., what happened when). Drawing on findings from developmental and cognitive psychology, we suggest that this capacity emerges early, extends across domains, and reflects a fundamental constraint of human cognition. Understanding the origins, developmental trajectory, and functional role of this spatial predisposition can shed light on how abstract knowledge is learned, represented and reasoned about, and how space supports learning across development.
Volpi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.