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Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture
Name
sciadv.abg4141.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
238.18 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
bbb9f40b14e740e878a0f6ef19b1e1c8
Author(s)
Pitt, Benjamin
Ferrigno, Stephen
Cantlon, Jessica F
Casasanto, Daniel
Gibson, Edward
Piantadosi, Steven T
Date Issued
August 13, 2021
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Pitt, Benjamin, Ferrigno, Stephen, Cantlon, Jessica F, Casasanto, Daniel, Gibson, Edward et al. 2021. "Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture." Science Advances, 7 (33).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In industrialized groups, adults implicitly map numbers, time, and size onto space according to cultural practices like reading and counting (e.g., from left to right). Here, we tested the mental mappings of the Tsimane', an indigenous population with few such cultural practices. Tsimane' adults spatially arranged number, size, and time stimuli according to their relative magnitudes but showed no directional bias for any domain on any spatial axis; different mappings went in different directions, even in the same participant. These findings challenge claims that people have an innate left-to-right mapping of numbers and that these mappings arise from a domain-general magnitude system. Rather, the direction-specific mappings found in industrialized cultures may originate from direction-agnostic mappings that reflect the correlational structure of the natural world.
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1126/sciadv.abg4141
