Space

Despite the global universality of physical space, cultures vary substantially as to how space is coded in their language. Some for example do not use egocentric ‘left, right, front, back’ constructions to code spatial relations, instead using allocentric notions like ‘north, south, east, west’. While seeming unusual to us, utterances like “There is a scorpion by your northern foot!” are commonplace in other cultures. Whether not only spatial language, but also spatial cognition varies across cultures remains a highly contested question. In the Space subproject we investigate whether memory for spatial locations and movements of one’s own body parts differs between cultures with contrastive linguistic strategies to code spatial relations.

We further investigate the ancient inherited biases for processing spatial information by comparing spatial cognition across all great ape species. The model for human spatial cognition that we propose has a rich, inherited primate basis, which may be masked by cultural specificities. For more information, please contact Daniel Haun.