Spatial cognition in apes and humans

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.03.002

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 11, Issue 5, May 2007, Pages 192-194

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.03.002 Get rights and content

The debate on whether language influences cognition is sometimes seen as a simple dichotomy: cognitive development is governed either by innate predispositions or by influences of language and culture. In two recent papers on spatial cognition, Haun and colleagues break new ground in bringing together a comparative cognition approach with a cross-linguistic framework to arrive at a third position: that humans begin with the same spatial reference frames as our near relatives, the great apes, and diverge later owing to the influence of language and culture.

Introduction

In two recent papers 1, 2, Haun and colleagues unite two important current lines of research: cross-linguistic studies of language and cognition [3], and studies in the comparative cognition of humans and great apes 4, 5.

This research draws on a large-scale investigation of cross-linguistic differences in spatial semantics 6, 7 that has identified three frames of reference that speakers use to identify the location of an object. The egocentric (or relative) frame describes the location of an object relative to the speaker, as in ‘the chair on my left’. The object-centered (or intrinsic) frame describes locations relative to a landmark object, as in ‘the chair in front of the fireplace’. Finally, the geocentric (or absolute) frame describes locations relative to a global frame, as in ‘the chair in the northwest corner’. Languages can use more than one of these frames, but in many cases one frame is dominant. In particular, the egocentric frame is dominant in English, Dutch and German, whereas the geocentric frame is dominant in Tzeltal (southern Mexico) and Hai||om (Namibia), among others. Using a clever set of tasks, researchers have amassed evidence that people given nonlinguistic spatial tasks show a strong tendency to use whichever frame is dominant in their language 3, 6 (but see Ref. [8]). This work has been a major impetus in reviving the Whorfian question of whether the language we speak influences the way we habitually think 9, 10, 11.

Evidence of linguistic effects on spatial cognition invites the question of how they develop. Do we begin life with natural proclivities or instead with ‘blank slates’ on which language, culture and other experience impose spatial frames? Haun et al. addressed this question in a bold and ingenious set of studies that combines cross-linguistic developmental comparisons with cross-species comparisons between humans and our close relatives, the great apes.

Section snippets

Spatial frame of reference

Haun et al.[1] compared Dutch and German speakers, whose language (like English) primarily uses an egocentric frame of reference, with speakers of Hai||om (a Khoisan language spoken in Namibia), which primarily uses a geocentric frame. They used a hide-and-search task with the five-object arrays shown in Figure 1. The subject (S) watched the experimenter hide Target 1 under one of the five identical objects on Table 1, then moved to Table 2 (now facing the opposite direction) and searched for

Encoding location versus features

In another study, Haun et al.[2] looked earlier in development at a different aspect of spatial cognition: do subjects track the location of a hidden object by its spatial location or by the features of its hiding place? They used a switch task – a kind of shell game but using distinctive ‘shells’ (inverted containers). A target was hidden under one container; then two containers were swapped while the display was occluded. Three-year-olds searched under the original container (in a new

Concluding remarks

Putting the two studies together, in one task [2], humans share a locational bias with apes at one year of age, but diverge to an object bias by three years. In the other [1], we share an allocentric bias with apes at four years and then diverge to an egocentric bias (or not) by eight years, according to language and culture. This suggests that different aspects of human acculturation influence different spatial representations and processes. For example, the early divergence of humans from

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSF SLC Grant SBE-0541957, the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC).

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People make use of different frames of reference (north-south; left-right) to talk about space. To explore the cognitive capacity that children bring to learning spatial language, Haun, Rapold, Call, Janzen, and Levinson (2006) examined children’s ability to notice and abstract invariant frames of references across instances. They found that 4-year-olds and non-human great apes often noticed environment-defined allocentric relations and not body-defined egocentric ones, leading them to conclude that preschoolers are ready to learn environment-defined terms (e.g. “uphill”), but not body-defined ones (e.g., “left”). However, such a conclusion may be premature. In four new experiments we demonstrate that the previous findings could be an artifact of specific task constraints. With minor experiment modifications, similar-aged children readily noticed egocentric relations. Reviewing additional research, we provide an account of what makes acquiring frames of reference easy or difficult, and why full mastery of terms like “left” and “right” may take many years under normal circumstances.
Frames of reference in spatial language acquisition
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Although children did not show evidence of responding differently when the conflict between their perspective and the experimenter’s was removed, children’s bias toward environment-based interpretations may arise as a more general heuristic to minimize ambiguity. A related possibility is that when referencing and locating something in space, it is preferable to choose a FoR using entities anchored to earth rather than entities that move, in order to maximize the stability of the representation of the location (Gentner, 2007; Haun et al., 2006). Hence, when forced to choose, children may weigh geocentric relations more heavily than object-centric relations.
Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. It is unknown how children acquire the particular frame-of-reference terms in their language (e.g., left/right, north/south). The present paper uses a word-learning paradigm to investigate 4-year-old English-speaking children’s acquisition of such terms. In Part I, with five experiments, we contrasted children’s acquisition of novel word pairs meaning left-right and north-south to examine their initial hypotheses and the relative ease of learning the meanings of these terms. Children interpreted ambiguous spatial terms as having environment-based meanings akin to north and south, and they readily learned and generalized north-south meanings. These studies provide the first direct evidence that children invoke geocentric representations in spatial language acquisition. However, the studies leave unanswered how children ultimately acquire “left” and “right.” In Part II, with three more experiments, we investigated why children struggle to master body-based frame-of-reference words. Children successfully learned “left” and “right” when the novel words were systematically introduced on their own bodies and extended these words to novel (intrinsic and relative) uses; however, they had difficulty learning to talk about the left and right sides of a doll. This difficulty was paralleled in identifying the left and right sides of the doll in a non-linguistic memory task. In contrast, children had no difficulties learning to label the front and back sides of a doll. These studies begin to paint a detailed account of the acquisition of spatial terms in English, and provide insights into the origins of diverse spatial reference frames in the world’s languages.
Environment, cognition, and culture: Reconsidering the cognitive map
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Davies and Uttal (2007) point to several factors that might make it difficult for children to recognize the utility of using map-derived knowledge as a tool for thinking when they are faced with navigational challenges in spite of map-reading abilities. If we add to this account the emerging evidence that by eight years of age children also begin to evince the culture's ways of talking about spatial relations (Gentner, 2007; Haun, Rapold, Call, Janzen, & Levinson, 2006), the case for the influence of the developmental context on environmental cognition grows even stronger. Conceptual confusion ensues when researchers do not consider that the ‘cognitive map,’ taken to be a mental representation of spatial configuration, is a by-product of the interaction of tool use and discourse, stemming from concrete engagement with local environmental conditions over development, rather than arising from psychological processes taken independently of the environment.
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In such tasks, Dutch speakers overwhelmingly produced egocentric responses, while Tseltal speakers primarily produced geocentric responses. This apparently stable correlation between spatial language and spatial reasoning has led several investigators to the conclusion that language shapes one’s underlying preferences for representing spatial relations (Levinson et al., 2002; Majid et al., 2004; Pederson et al., 1998; cf. Gentner, 2007). Specifically, it is argued that people “appear to code their everyday non-linguistic spatial representations in line with their linguistic frames of reference” (Majid et al., 2004, p. 108; cf. Pederson et al., 1998).
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Space and time interact with each other in the cognitive system. Recent studies indicate the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) as the neural correlate of spatial–temporal interactions. We studied whether the contribution of the PPC becomes critical in tasks requiring the performance of spatial computations on time intervals. We adopted an integrated neuropsychological and transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) approach, presenting behavioural timing tasks to both healthy subjects and right-brain-damaged patients with and without evidence of spatial neglect. rTMS of the right PPC of healthy subjects induced a lateralised bias during a task requiring setting the midpoint of a time interval. This bias mimicked the rightward bias observed in tasks requiring setting the midpoint of line intervals. These effects were selectively encountered when rTMS was applied during the retrieval phase of the task, while no effects were observed during the initial encoding phase of the time interval. Similar effects were also observed during bisection of time intervals by right-brain-damaged patients with spatial neglect. The specific role of the right PPC in bisection of physical intervals was confirmed by an experiment in which line segments were used.
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

UpdateResearch FocusSpatial cognition in apes and humans

Introduction

Section snippets

Spatial frame of reference

Encoding location versus features

Concluding remarks

Acknowledgements

Curr. Biol.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Cognition

Cognitive cladistics and cultural override in Hominid spatial cognition

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity

Object permanence in orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and children (Homo sapiens)

J. Comp. Psychol.

Primate Cognition

Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization

Language

Update
Research Focus
Spatial cognition in apes and humans