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Step to the left, or step to the east?
Even the way people remember dance moves seems to depend on the culture they come from. While a German or other Westerner might think in terms of 'step to the left, step to the right', a nomadic hunter-gatherer from Namibia will think more in terms of 'step to the east, step to the west'. A new study by a cross-disciplinary team from the MPI's for Psycholinguistics and Evolutionary Anthropology shows that remembering movements of one's own body varies dramatically between cultures. The study will be published in the December 14th issue of Current Biology.
Dec 14, 2009
If your dancing instructor asked you to step to the left, you would swiftly comply. But how would you react of he asked you to step to the south? Despite the fact that physical space follows similar laws everywhere across the globe, cultures vary as to how space is coded in their language. Some, for example, do not use egocentric terms such as ‘left, right, front, back’ to talk about spatial relations, but use allocentric notions like ‘north, south, east, west’ at all times for all scales. 'The spoon is north of the bowl' or 'There is a snake by your Northern leg!'.
Learn a short dance
In their study, MPI researchers Daniel Haun and Christian Rapold compared children in two cultures which have different ways to talk about spatial relations: Germans, whose language preferentially codes space in egocentric terms, and the Akhoe Hai||om, a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer group of Northern Namibia, whose language preferentially codes space in allocentric terms. They asked children to learn a short dance, during which they move their clasped hands from one side of their body to the other in a right-left-right-right (RLRR) sequence. Then, the participants were rotated 180 degrees around their own axis, and asked to dance again. Afterwards, they danced again in their original orientation. If participants coded the RLRR dance in egocentric coordinates, they should produce a RLRR sequence after both rotations. Alternatively, if participants coded a RLRR dance in allocentric coordinates, they should produce a LRLL sequence after rotation 1 and a RLRR sequence after rotation 2. While almost all German children produced body-centered responses, the vast majority of Akhoe Hai||om children memorised movements of their limbs in relation to an external reference system anchored in their environment. In other words, their arms don’t move right, but west.
'Widen our perspective'
'The human mind varies more across cultures than we generally assume', says Daniel Haun. 'Even everyday tasks that we would never think of doing any other way, like remembering body movements, are done differently in other places. It's becoming more and more clear that we cannot simply extrapolate from investigations within our own population to others. To understand the human mind, we need to widen our perspective and assume diversity rather than universality of cognition until proven otherwise.'
