The Classic Wanderer

What Is Spatial Organization In Psychology?

• Sabrina Sarro
• 05.05.2023
• 0
• 19

Spatial organization is an aspect of spatial perception and concerns the perception of spatial relationships.

What is meant by spatial organization?

Spatial organization, as one of the basic themes of geography, focuses on how to recognize and organize geographic space in which human activities occur, giving rise to spatial structures.

What is an example of a spatial organization?

What is an example of spatial organization? An example of spatial organization would be a city every certain number of miles along a highway. Another example would be an aerial photograph of farmland that is illustrated by large, green, or yellow grid squares.

What are the basic concepts of spatial organization?

Course Description – Some basic concepts of spatial organization: principle of classification geographical phenomena; growth and spatial distribution of population; spatial occurrence of natural resources. Nature of natural resources; condition of resource exploitation.

What is a spatial ability in psychology?

The ability to mentally manipulate objects in space and to imagine them in different locations and positions. It is one of the distinct intelligences in Gardner’s multiple-intelligences theory and also a primary mental ability (S) in Thurstone’s theory of primary abilities.

What are the three levels of spatial organization?

Scales of Spatial Organization for Transportation | The Geography of Transport Systems Scales of Spatial Organization for Transportation There is a hierarchy in the spatial organization of transportation at the local, regional and global levels, mainly through its nodes, links, and relations,

While gateways, supported by port, airport, and telecommunication activities, are the major nodes impacting spatial organization at the global level at the local level, the main nodes are employment and commercial activities, which tend to cluster. These scales are also characterized by specific links and relations ranging from local commuting to global trade flows and supply chains.

: Scales of Spatial Organization for Transportation | The Geography of Transport Systems

What is a real life example of spatial approach?

When a business is deciding where to place a new location, they use the spatial perspective. Real estate agents consider the spatial perspective when sending clients details of houses they might want to buy. Even choosing where to go on holiday or which school to send your kids to involves the spatial perspective.

What are 3 examples of spatial patterns?

Types of spatial patterns represented on maps include absolute and relative distance and direction, clustering, dispersal, and elevation.

What are the factors of spatial organization?

Author: Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue – Geography imposes an organization to activities and, consequently, a spatial structure. Inversely, the spatial structure influences geography. The spatial organization relies on two dimensions that underline that uniformity rarely exists.

The first relates to spatial differentiation, where attributes such as location, size, and density illustrate inequalities in the distribution of features such as population or resources. This differentiation is the outcome of a cumulative process of spatial accumulation as several elements of the spatial structure, such as urban areas, accumulate population and infrastructures at different rates and densities.

The second relates to spatial interactions where flows illustrate inequalities in the characteristics of origins and destinations. Transportation not only favors economic development but also has an impact on spatial organization. Throughout history, transport networks have structured space at different scales.

The fragmentation of production and consumption, the locational specificities of resources, labor, and markets generate a wide array of people and freight flows. The structure of these flows in terms of origin, destination, and routing are closely related to spatial organization. Space shapes transport as much as transport shapes space, which is a salient example of the reciprocity of transportation and its geography.

This reciprocity can be articulated over two points:

Reciprocity to locations, This relationship concerns the transport system and the impacts it has on locations. Since the transport system is composed of nodes and links as well as the flows they are supporting, the spatial organization of this system is a core defining component of the spatial structure. Transportation, by its physicality, shapes the spatial structure. Even if the streets are not the city, they shape its organization in terms of locations, orientations, and relations. The same applies to maritime shipping networks, which are not international trade but reflect the spatial organization of the global economy. Reciprocity to demand, This relationship concerns activities that are all dependent on transportation at different levels and different scales. Since every single activity is based on a level of transport demand and mobility, the relationship they have with transportation is reflected in their spatial organization. While a small retail activity is conditioned by local accessibility from which it draws its customers, a large manufacturing plant relies on accessibility to global freight distribution for its inputs (parts) as well as its outputs (finished goods).

The more interdependent an economy is, the more transportation becomes a support and a factor shaping its interdependencies. However, the importance of transportation can be neglected as interdependencies will be noticed while their structural support less so; The effect is being observed while its cause is not. Transportation Infrastructures and their Constraints Scales of Spatial Organization for Transportation At the global level, transportation supports and shapes economic specialization and productivity through international trade. Improvements in transport are expanding markets and development opportunities, but not uniformly,

The inequalities of the global economy are reflected in its spatial organization and the structure of international transport systems. Globalization incited a growth in spatial flows (trade) and increased interdependencies. Telecommunications, maritime transport, and air transport, because of their scale of service, support most global flows.

The nature and spatial structure of these flows can be considered from two major perspectives that seek to explain global differences in growth and accessibility:

Core / periphery, This basic representation assumes that the global spatial organization favors a few core areas that grow faster than the periphery, with differential growth creating inequalities in development levels. For instance, global migration flows are illustrative of different levels of economic development, with flows from locations with lower development levels to higher development levels dominating. Transportation is thus perceived as a factor of polarization and unequal development. From this perspective, parts of the global economy are gaining because they are more accessible, while others are marginalized and bound to dependency. However, this trend can be reversed if international transport costs are significantly reduced. This is evidenced by the substantial growth of many Pacific Asian economies that have opted for an export-oriented strategy that requires good access to global freight distribution. Consequently, the core/periphery relationship is flexible, relative, and can change in time. Poles, Transportation is perceived as a factor of articulation in the global economy, where the circulation of passengers and freight is regulated by poles corresponding to a high accumulation of transport infrastructures, distribution facilities, and economic activities. These poles are subject to centrifugal and centripetal forces that have favored the concentration of some activities and the dispersion of others. The global economy is thus based on the backbone of freight distribution, which relies on networks established to support its flows and on nodes that regulate flows within networks. Networks, particularly those concerning maritime shipping and air transportation, are flexible entities that change with the ebb and tides of commerce, while nodes are locations fixed within their regional geography.

Core / Periphery Division of the World Global Net Migration (2010-2015) Trade, Connectivity and Spatial Inequalities Poles of the Global Economy Forces of Geographical Concentration and Dispersion Global flows are handled by poles labeled as gateways and hubs depending on their geographical and modal context. Gateway, A location offering accessibility to a large system of circulation of freight and passengers.

Gateways reap the advantage of a favorable physical location such as highway junctions, the confluence of rivers, a good port site, and have been the object of a significant accumulation of transport infrastructures such as terminals and their links. A gateway is commonly an origin, a destination, and a point of transit.

It generally commands the entrance to and the exit from its catchment area. In other words, it is a pivotal point for the entry and exit in a region, a country, or a continent and often requires intermodal transfers. Hub, A central point for the collection, sorting, transshipment, and distribution of goods for an area.

This concept comes from a term used in air transport for passengers as well as for freight and describes collection and distribution through a single point such as the “Hub and Spoke” concept. The global spatial organization is a priori conditioned by its connectivity, which is often reflective of a network structure.

Its main components are the nodes and the foreland (international connectivity, usually by maritime and air transportation) and hinterlands (regional connectivity, usually by land transport systems). Through the principle of economies of agglomeration and accessibility, a region can accumulate several major intermodal infrastructures, namely port, and airport terminals, reinforcing its connectivity.

1. When these nodes act as an interface, they can be characterized as gateway systems (or regions) that play a substantial role in the global distribution of freight, connecting major systems of circulation.
2. Gateways also act as bottlenecks in global freight distribution, imposing constraints related to their capacity, the performance of their infrastructure, or their supply chain management capabilities.

Gateways started to emerge in the 19th century when rail transportation began structuring hinterland accessibility by allowing specific locations, such as ports, to command access to vast market areas. Later, the emergence of air transport enabled the setting of gateways between global and regional air transport systems.

1. Services are following a spatial trend that appears to be increasingly different than production.
2. As production dispersed globally to lower-cost locations, high-level services focused on a relatively few large metropolitan areas, labeled as world cities,
3. They are centers for financial services (banking, insurance), head offices of major multinational corporations, innovation clusters, nexuses for the arts, and the seats of major governments.

Gateways and world cities may not necessarily correspond as locations, underlining the ongoing dichotomy between central places (commercial imperatives) and transport places (distribution imperatives). This is particularly the case for containerized traffic, which is linked with new manufacturing clusters and the usage of intermediary hubs. Gateways and Hubs The Relevance of Connectivity The Geographical Components of Connectivity Global Gateways Index, 2010 Types of Bottlenecks World Cities, 2012 World’s 250 Largest Corporations by Head Office City Regions are commonly organized along with an interdependent set of cities, forming what is often referred to as an urban system, The key spatial foundation of an urban system is based on a series of market areas, which are a function of the level of activity of each center in relation to the friction of distance.

A set of locations of specialized industries such as manufacturing and mining, which tend to group into agglomerations according to location factors such as raw materials, labor, or market accessibility. They are often export-oriented industries from which a region derives the bulk of its basic growth. A set of service industry locations, including administration, finance, retail, wholesale, and other similar services, which tend to agglomerate in a system of central places (cities) providing optimal accessibility to labor or potential customers. A pattern of transport nodes and links, such as roads, railways, ports, and airports, which services major centers of economic activity.

Delimitation and Variations in Market Areas Core-Periphery Stages of Development in a Urban System Conceptual Corridor Development Transport Corridors and the Regional Spatial Structure Jointly, these components define the spatial order of a region, mostly its organization in a hierarchy of relationships involving the mobility of passengers and freight. More or less well-defined urban systems spatially translate such developments, with the most important cities being the best connected and accessible while lower-order centers have less connectivity.

1. This begets whether connectivity is an outcome of city size or if city size is the outcome of connectivity.
2. Many conceptual models have been proposed to explain the relationships between transport, urban systems, and regional development, the core-periphery stages of development, and network expansion theories.

Three conceptual categories of regional spatial organization can be observed:

Central places / urban systems models try to find the relationships between the size, the number, and the geographic distribution of cities in a region. The central places theory has investigated many variations of the regional spatial structure. The vast majority of urban systems have a well-established and stable hierarchy where a few centers dominate. Transportation is particularly important in such a representation as the organization of central places is based on minimizing the friction of distance. The territorial structure depicted by the central places theory is the outcome of a region seeking the provision of services in a (transport) cost-effective way. Growth poles where economic development is the structural change caused by the growth of new industries that are the poles of growth. The location of these activities is the catalyst of the regional spatial organization. Growth poles first initiate, then diffuse, development. Growth gets distributed within a regional urban system, but this process is uneven, with the core benefiting first and the periphery eventually becoming integrated with a system of flows. In the growth poles theory, transportation is a factor of accessibility, which reinforces the importance of poles. Transport corridors represent an accumulation of flows and infrastructures of various modes, with their development linked with economic, infrastructural, and technological processes. When these processes involve urban development, corridors are a system of cities oriented along an axis, commonly fluvial or a coastline, that permits cities to maintain commercial relations. Many urban regions, such as BostWash (Boston – Washington) or Tokaido (Tokyo – Osaka) share this spatial commonality. The development of high-speed train systems around the world takes place along major urban corridors and reinforces the existing regional spatial structure.

Central Places Theory (Market Principle) Market Size / Area Relationships in the Central Places Theory Variations of the Central Places Theory Growth Poles Theory The BostWash Corridor The Tokaido Corridor World High Speed Rail Systems, 2014 Although transport is an important element in rural spatial organization, it is at the urban level that transportation has the most significant local spatial impact. Urbanization and transport are interrelated concepts, particularly with transport shaping the size and extent of cities,

Employment zones, The growing dissociation between the workplace and the residence is mainly due to the success of motorized transport, notably the private automobile. Employment zones being located away from residential zones have contributed to an increase in number and length of commuting trips. Before suburbanization, public transit was wholly responsible for commuting. Today, the automobile supports the majority of these trips, but the city supports a wide range of mobility options. This trend is particularly prevalent in highly populated, industrialized, and urbanized zones, but motorization is also a dominant trend in developing economies. Attraction zones, Attraction zones linked to transport modes are areas to which a large number of individuals will travel for reasons such as shopping, professional services, education, and leisure. As with central places theory, there is a specific hierarchy of services within an urban area ranging from the central business district offering a wide variety of specialized services to small local centers providing basic services such as groceries and personal banking.

The development of cities is conditioned by transport, and several modes, from urban transit to the automobile, have contributed to the creation of urban landscapes. Three distinct phases can be noted:

Conventional (classic) city, Constructed for pedestrian interactions and constrained by them, the historical city was compact and limited in size. The emergence of the first urban transit systems in the 19th century permitted the extension of the city into new neighborhoods. However, pedestrian movements still accounted for the vast majority of movements, and the local spatial organization remained compact. Many European and Asian cities still have a significant level of compactness, where urban transit remains a defining element of spatial organization. Suburbanization, The advent of more efficient urban transit systems and, later, the automobile permitted an increased separation between basic urban functions (residential, industrial and commercial) and their spatial specialization. The rapid expansion of urban areas that resulted, especially in North America, created a new spatial organization, less cohesive than before, but still relatively adjacent to the existing urban fabric. Although this process started in the early 20th century, it accelerated in the 1950s. Exurbanization, Additional improvements in mobility favored urban expansion in the countryside, where urban and rural activities are somewhat intermixed. Many cities became extended metropolitan regions with a wide array of specialized functions, including residential areas, commercial centers, industrial parks, logistics centers, recreational areas, and high-tech zones. These exurban developments have also been called “edge cities”.

The automobile has influenced contemporary urban spatial organization, but other socioeconomic factors have also shaped urban development, such as gentrification and differential changes in land values, The diffusion of the automobile has led to an urban expansion relying on the mobility of individuals and often conflicting urban functions (residential, industrial, commercial). One Hour Commuting According to Different Urban Transportation Modes Central Places in Urban Areas Land Use Values and Activity Sectors Population Density Changes by Census Block, Chicago 2000-2010

What are the five barriers to ideal spatial organization?

The types of barriers ‘which are most relevant in this context are related to language, available technology, distance, cultural background, personal relationships, education, etc.

What is an example of spatial in psychology?

Spatial intelligence: A definition and some examples – Spatial intelligence, or visuo-spatial ability, has been defined “the ability to generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images” (Lohman 1996). It’s what we do when we visualize shapes in our “mind’s eye.” It’s the mental feat that architects and engineers perform when they design buildings.

1. The capacity that permits a chemist to contemplate the three-dimensional structure of a molecule, or a surgeon to navigate the human body.
2. It’s what Michelangelo used when he visualized a future sculpture trapped inside a lump of stone.
3. It’s also the mode of thought we use to imagine different visual perspectives.

Are these two shapes different? Or are they identical and merely oriented differently? Sample test image by Anomal et al 20 20 (cited below) and licensed under CCBY4.0 This is a classic mental rotation test – one what that researchers measure visuospatial ability (Anomal et al 2020). Another spatial intelligence test presents a figure made of blocks, and asks the test taker to create an exact copy.

Preschoolers who are better at visualizing spatial relationships develop stronger arithmetic abilities in primary school (Zhang et al 2014; Gilligan et al 2017; Verdine et al 2014; Verdine et al 2017).

Middle school students who are good at mental rotation are more likely to achieve in science classes (Ganley et al 2014).

Wai et al 2009; Uttal et al 2013).

Teens with excellent spatial skills are also more likely to secure employment in the visual arts or business (Wai et al 2009). And there is even evidence that early spatial ability predicts a young child’s reading skills (Franceschini et al 2012). So clearly spatial skills matter.

What is an example of spatial learning in psychology?

Spatial learning and navigation is critical to the survival of any animal that hides food for later retrieval when food is scarce. This has led to the suggestion that animals must rely on representations of shape and space geometry, rather than representations of specific features of the space and landmarks.

For example, if a bird hides food during warm weather, the landmark features that might have been used to identify where the food is buried will be covered in snow when the food is retrieved in the winter. In contrast, snow will have little impact on the shape of the environment. Dumont and colleagues (2015, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition ) (PDF, 210KB) tested the claim that animals encode and rely on shape information independently of feature information in spatial learning.

Rats were placed in a rectangular pool with black walls, and were trained to find a hidden platform in front of the longer walls. Training was followed by two test trials where the platform was not present: one in which the walls were the same color as during training, and one in which the walls were white instead of black.

When the walls were the same color as during training, rats spent significantly more time searching the area in front of the long vs. short walls, indicating that the rats successfully learned the location of the platform based on geometric cues. However, there was no difference in search time for long vs.

short walls when the walls were in a different color than during training. Importantly, the only cue for learning the location of the hidden platform during training was a geometric property, wall length. Therefore, navigation based on a geometric cue was impaired by changing a feature property (color) of the objects creating that cue, even though the feature was irrelevant to the initial spatial learning task.

This is inconsistent with the claim that spatial learning is based on geometric cues, independently of the features of those cues. Dumont and colleagues examined how external features of the environment influence spatial learning performance. An advantage of animal work is that researchers can also test the neural systems that underlie such behavior.

Of particular relevance for spatial learning are head direction cells, which fire when an animal’s head is pointed in a particular direction. Damage to early components of the head direction cell circuit, where the signal likely originates, is known to disrupt spatial learning in rats.

Peckford and colleagues (2014, Behavioral Neuroscience ) (PDF, 261KB) tested whether damage to later circuit components, the anterior dorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN) and postsubiculum (PoS), also impair spatial learning. Relative to controls, rats with ADN lesions took longer to learn to go in a consistent direction to locate a hidden platform in a T-maze, but this impairment diminished with training; rats with PoS lesions were not impaired relative to controls on this task.

Comparing these results to previous studies suggests that damage to later areas of the head direction cell circuit are not as disruptive as damage to earlier components. In a foraging task, rats were trained to enter a circular space through one of 8 holes around the perimeter, retrieve a food pellet from one of three cups in the center of the space, and return via the same hole from which they entered (home hole).

• Correct trials were those in which the rat did not visit any holes other than the correct central food hole and the home hole.
• Rats with both ADN and PoS lesions were impaired on this task relative to control rats.
• Because lesioned rats returned to holes adjacent to the home hole more often than control rats, the authors speculate that damage to these areas may broaden the firing range of head direction cells.

In other words, damage to the ADN and PoS may influence the precision of head direction cells, rather than rendering them inoperative.

What is an example of spatial representation in psychology?

1.33.2.2.3.(v) Idiothetic update by path integration – We have considered how spatial representations could be stored in continuous attractor networks and how the activity can be maintained at any location in the state space in a form of short-term memory when the external (e.g., visual) input is removed.

• However, many networks with spatial representations in the brain can be updated by internal, self-motion (i.e., idiothetic) cues even when there is no external (e.g., visual) input.
• The way in which path integration could be implemented in recurrent networks such as the CA3 system in the hippocampus or in related systems is described next.

Single-cell recording studies have shown that some neurons represent the current position along a continuous physical dimension or space even when no inputs are available, for example, in darkness. Examples include neurons that represent the positions of the eyes (i.e., eye direction with respect to the head), the place where the animal is looking in space, head direction, and the place where the animal is located.

In particular, examples of such classes of cells include head direction cells in rats ( Ranck, 1985; Taube et al., 1990; Muller et al., 1996; Taube et al., 1996 ) and primates ( Robertson et al., 1999 ), which respond maximally when the animal’s head is facing in a particular preferred direction; place cells in rats ( O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971; McNaughton et al., 1983; O’Keefe, 1984; Muller et al., 1991; Markus et al., 1995 ) that fire maximally when the animal is in a particular location; and spatial view cells in primates that respond when the monkey is looking toward a particular location in space ( Rolls et al., 1997a; Robertson et al., 1998; Georges-François et al., 1999 ).

One approach to simulating the movement of an activity packet produced by idiothetic cues (which is a form of path integration whereby the current location is calculated from recent movements) is to employ a look-up table that stores (taking head direction cells as an example), for every possible head direction and head rotational velocity input generated by the vestibular system, the corresponding new head direction ( Samsonovich and McNaughton, 1997 ).

An analogous approach has been described for entorhinal cortex grid cells ( McNaughton et al., 2006 ). Another approach involves modulating the strengths of the recurrent synaptic weights in the continuous attractor on one but not the other side of a currently represented position, so that the stable position of the packet of activity, which requires symmetric connections in different directions from each node, is lost, and the packet moves in the direction of the temporarily increased weights, although no possible biological implementation was proposed of how the appropriate dynamic synaptic weight changes might be achieved ( Zhang, 1996 ).

Another mechanism (for head direction cells) ( Skaggs et al., 1995 ) relies on a set of cells, termed (head) rotation cells, which are coactivated by head direction cells and vestibular cells and drive the activity of the attractor network by anatomically distinct connections for clockwise and counterclockwise rotation cells, in what is effectively a look-up table.

However, these proposals did not show how the synaptic weights for this path integration could be achieved by a biologically plausible learning process. Stringer et al. (2002b) introduced a proposal with more biological plausibility about how the synaptic connections from idiothetic inputs to a continuous attractor network can be learned by a self-organizing learning process.

The mechanism associates a short-term memory trace of the firing of the neurons in the attractor network reflecting recent movements in the state space (e.g., of places) with an idiothetic velocity of movement input (see Figure 8 ). This has been applied to head direction cells ( Stringer et al., 2002b ), rat place cells ( Stringer et al., 2002a,b ), and primate spatial view cells ( Stringer et al., 2004, 2005; Rolls and Stringer, 2005 ).

1. These attractor networks provide a basis for understanding cognitive maps and how they are updated by learning and by self-motion.
2. The implication is that to the extent that path integration of place or spatial view representations is performed within the hippocampus itself, then the CA3 system is the most likely part of the hippocampus to be involved in this, because it has the appropriate recurrent collateral connections.

Consistent with this, Whishaw and colleagues ( Maaswinkel et al., 1999; Whishaw et al., 2001; Wallace and Whishaw, 2003 ) have shown that path integration is impaired by hippocampal lesions. Path integration of head direction is reflected in the firing of neurons in the presubiculum, and mechanisms outside the hippocampus probably implement path integration for head direction. Figure 8, Neural network architecture for two-dimensional continuous attractor models of place cells. There is a recurrent network of place cells with firing rates r P, which receives external inputs from three sources: (i) the visual system I V, (ii) a population of head direction cells with firing rates r HD, and (iii) a population of forward velocity cells with firing rates r FV,

What are the four 4 types of spatial relationship?

The Relation spatial relationship

Spatial relationship	Selection geometry	Requested geometry
Touch	Line	Poly
Touch	Poly	Poly
Within	Line	Line
Within	Point	Line

What are the advantages of spatial organization?

Advantages of Spatial Order Organization in Writing –

1. There might be times when you would have to describe and involve a lot of objects in your scene setting. In the absence of spatial order, this could lead to confusion for you and your professors, who would not be able to follow the sequence of your description. Spatial order results in clear writing.
2. A scene can be completely described using logical order. Through this logic, your professors will understand the content of your essay, no matter how complex the event or scene is.
3. The use of transition and signal words in spatial order essays is highly necessary as they connect all the ideas and details of the essay and enhance the readability of your paper.

What are the 4 spatial relationships?

The Underlying Geography of Spatial Relationships – The term “spatial relationships” refers to the way objects are arranged in relation to one another in geographic space. For example, we can describe them as adjacency, contiguity, overlap, and proximity.

What is the spatial organization of the DNA?

The fundamental organization of the DNA in active and inactive compartments arises immediately after fertilization of the oocyte, even before genes are activated. This was discovered by researchers from the Hubrecht Institute and the Helmholtz Center Munich and will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms behind the development of a single fertilized oocyte into a complete organism that consists of many different cell types.

• The results were published in the scientific journal Nature on the 22nd of May.
• From fertilized oocyte to complete organism A fertilized oocyte, a zygote, eventually develops into a whole organism that consists of trillions of cells with a wide diversity of functions.
• Despite these various functions, the DNA in all of these cells is the same.

The identity of cells is determined by sets of genes that are turned ‘on’ and ‘off’. But how do all of these cells organize which genes are turned ‘on’ and ‘off’? DNA organization in the nucleus The DNA is not just haphazardly deposited into the nucleus of the cell, but instead spatially organized in active and inactive compartments.

1. The compartments that are not active are tethered to the edge of the round shaped nucleus.
2. This edge consists of a thin layer that is called the lamina, and these DNA compartments are therefore called Lamina Associated Domains, or LADs.
3. You can compare the DNA that is divided into LADs and inter-LADs to a very long garland, that is not tangled up on the floor of the living room, but instead attached to the ceiling at anchor points,” says Jop Kind, group leader at the Hubrecht Institute.

“This results in a spatially organized chromosome-partitioning that makes the untethered parts (the inter-LADs) more accessible for activation compared to the parts that are tethered to the ceiling (the LADs).” In cells with different functions, different parts of the DNA are tethered to the lamina, although there are certain LADs that are present in all cell types.

New method Different cell types thus differ in the sets of genes that are turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ and which parts of the DNA are tethered to the lamina. Until now it was unclear which of these characteristics occurs first in the cell. The researchers therefore developed a new method through which they could analyze the organization of the DNA in LADs and inter-LADs very early in the development of an embryo.

They did this at different timepoints, from the early zygote, even before genes are activated in the embryo, until the moment at which the embryo consists of eight cells. Which characteristic forms first? The researchers discovered that the DNA in the zygote is already organized in LADs and inter-LADs before genes are activated in the embryo.

LADs are therefore formed before the activity of genes starts to play a role. In addition, the researchers found that the activity of genes during the development of an embryo changes in accordance with changes in the LAD structure. Therefore, it seems that organizing the DNA into LADs and inter-LADs is a very early event in a process that eventually leads to the identity of a cell.

Primitive LADs The LADs that were found in the early zygote turned out to very closely match the LADs that are present in all cell types. In addition, these LADs match the LADs in the so-called “pluripotent stem cells,” stem cells that can still develop into all cell types of the embryo.

“The LADs in the zygote therefore seem to be ‘primitive’ LADs,” says Kind, “some sort of basic suspension system in the cell nucleus that can be built upon when the cell specializes.” Future The newly developed method and its first results show that this approach can be used to further investigate the mechanisms involved in the formation of an entire organism from a single fertilized oocyte.

In the future this will lead to a better understanding of normal development, but will also give more insights in what can go wrong during the development of an embryo.

What is another word for spatial organisation?

Alternate Synonyms for ‘spatial arrangement’: spacing; placement; arrangement.

What is spatial vs topical organization?

Spatial Style: Organization form used to arrange main points according to their physical and geographic relationships. Topical Style: Organization form used when the main points of a speech revolve around ideas that aren’t bound by a pre-determined relationship.

What is spatial vs chronological organization?

A spatial organizational pattern involves arranging the main points according to how they fit together, their relationships to one another, or their physical location. A chronological speech pattern arranges the main points sequentially according to when they happened in time.