STUDYING SPATIAL CONCEPTUALIZATION ACROSS CULTURES - ANTHROPOLOGY ANDCOGNITIVE SCIENCE

Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have argued that spatial co nception is pivotal to cognition in general, providing a general, egoc entric, and universal framework for cognition as well as metaphors for conceptualizing many other domains. But in an aboriginal community in Northern Queensland, a system of cardinal directions informs not only language, but also memory for arbitrary spatial arrays and directions . This work suggests that fundamental cognitive parameters, like the s ystem of coding spatial locations, can vary cross-culturally, in line with the language spoken by a community. This opens up the prospect of a fruitful dialogue between anthropology and the cognitive sciences o n the complex: interaction between cultural and universal factors in t he constitution of mind.