One Action, Two Reference Frames: Compound Cognitive Maps of Object Location

Benjamin Pitt
Additional contact information
Benjamin Pitt: IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: To navigate complex physical environments, animals keep track of the spatial relations among objects using various reference frames, both body-based (e.g., left/right) and environment-based (e.g., east/west), but how these spatial representations interact remains unresolved. Whereas neuroscientific findings show habitual integration across reference frames, psycholinguistic accounts suggest humans use one reference frame at a time, as in speech. This article examines whether people spontaneously use two reference frames in the same action. When placing a single object in a two-dimensional array, adult participants (N = 110) routinely used an environment-based frame to determine the object's left-right position while using a body-based frame to determine its front-back position at the same time. Such hybrid responses were prevalent among both Indigenous Tsimane' and educated U.S. participants, suggesting that people across cultures habitually construct compound cognitive maps to represent the multidimensional spatial relations that compose natural settings.

Keywords: spatial; non-WEIRD; memory; culture; cognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-neu
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05544906v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Psychological Science, 2025, vol. 36 (n° 11), pp.862-873. ⟨10.1177/09567976251391172⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05544906v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05544906

DOI: 10.1177/09567976251391172

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().