Space in Hand and Mind: Gesture and Spatial Frames of Reference in Bilingual Mexico

Time Tools

Many core human activities require an understanding of time. To coordinate rituals, plan harvests and hunts, recall histories, keep appointments, and follow recipes, we need to grapple with invisible temporal structures like durations, sequences, and cycles. No other species seems to do this. But it is not a capacity we humans have because we developed special neural equipment over biological evolution. We have it because we developed concepts, practices, and artifacts to help us-in short, because we developed time tools. The overarching function of such tools is that they render time more concrete: they identify structure in the flow of experience and make that structure available to the senses. By concretizing time in this way, these tools serve a range of practical purposes, from tallying and measuring, to coordinating and predicting, to remembering and reasoning. Beyond their practical utility, time tools have further consequences, too: they reverberate through cognition and culture, and ultimately reshape our understanding of what time is.

Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

English is the dominant language in the study of human cognition and behavior: the individuals studied by cognitive scientists, as well as most of the scientists themselves, are frequently English speakers. However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the study of language itself. Here, we review an emerging body of evidence that highlights how the particular characteristics of English and the linguistic habits of English speakers bias the field by both warping research programs (e.g., overemphasizing features and mechanisms present in English over others) and overgeneralizing observations from English speakers' behaviors, brains, and cognition to our entire species. We propose mitigating strategies that could help avoid some of these pitfalls.

Different reference frames on different axes: Space and language in indigenous Amazonians

Spatial cognition is central to human behavior, but the way people conceptualize space varies within and across groups for unknown reasons. Here, we found that adults from an indigenous Bolivian group used systematically different spatial reference frames on different axes, according to known differences in their discriminability: In both verbal and nonverbal tests, participants preferred allocentric (i.e., environment-based) space on the left-right axis, where spatial discriminations (like "b" versus "d") are notoriously difficult, but the same participants preferred egocentric (i.e., body-based) space on the front-back axis, where spatial discrimination is relatively easy. The results (i) establish a relationship between spontaneous spatial language and memory across axes within a single culture, (ii) challenge the claim that each language group has a predominant spatial reference frame at a given scale, and (iii) suggest that spatial thinking and language may both be shaped by spatial discrimination abilities, as they vary across cultures and contexts.