Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34380617.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abg4141 and PMC identifier 8357228.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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.