Space in Hand and Mind: Gesture and Spatial Frames of Reference in Bilingual Mexico.

Speakers of many languages prefer allocentric frames of reference (FoRs) when talking about small-scale space, using words like "east" or "downhill." Ethnographic work has suggested that this preference is also reflected in how such speakers gesture. Here, we investigate this possibility with a field experiment in Juchitán, Mexico.

The career of measurement.

Units as they exist today are highly abstract. Meters, miles, and other modern measures have no obvious basis in tangible phenomena and can be applied broadly across domains. Historical examples suggest, however, that units have not always been so abstract.

The Preference for Pointing With the Hand Is Not Universal.

Pointing is a cornerstone of human communication, but does it take the same form in all cultures? Manual pointing with the index finger appears to be used universally, and it is often assumed to be universally preferred over other forms. Non-manual pointing with the head and face has also been widely attested, but it is usually considered of marginal significance, both empirically and theoretically. Here, we challenge this assumed marginality.

When Gesture Becomes Analogy.

Analogy researchers do not often examine gesture, and gesture researchers do not often borrow ideas from the study of analogy. One borrowable idea from the world of analogy is the importance of distinguishing between attributes and relations. Gentner (, ) observed that some metaphors highlight attributes and others highlight relations, and called the latter analogies.

Where Does the Ordered Line Come From? Evidence From a Culture of Papua New Guinea.

Number lines, calendars, and measuring sticks all represent order along some dimension (e.g., magnitude) as position on a line.

Spatial analogies pervade complex relational reasoning: Evidence from spontaneous gestures.

How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining spontaneous gestures. In two studies, participants read a written lesson describing positive and negative feedback systems and then explained the differences between them. Though the lesson was highly abstract and people were not instructed to gesture, people produced spatial gestures in abundance during their explanations.

Uphill and Downhill in a Flat World: The Conceptual Topography of the Yupno House.

Speakers of many languages around the world rely on body-based contrasts (e.g., left/right) for spatial communication and cognition.

Gesture for Linguists: A Handy Primer.

Humans communicate using language, but they also communicate using - spontaneous movements of the hands and body that universally accompany speech. Gestures can be distinguished from other movements, segmented, and assigned meaning based on their forms and functions. Moreover, gestures systematically integrate with language at all levels of linguistic structure, as evidenced in both production and perception.

The Continuity of Metaphor: Evidence From Temporal Gestures.

Reasoning about bedrock abstract concepts such as time, number, and valence relies on spatial metaphor and often on multiple spatial metaphors for a single concept. Previous research has documented, for instance, both future-in-front and future-to-right metaphors for time in English speakers. It is often assumed that these metaphors, which appear to have distinct experiential bases, remain distinct in online temporal reasoning.

The tangle of space and time in human cognition.

Everyday concepts of duration, of sequence, and of past, present, and future are fundamental to how humans make sense of experience. In culture after culture, converging evidence from language, co-speech gesture, and behavioral tasks suggests that humans handle these elusive yet indispensable notions by construing them spatially. Where do these spatial construals come from and why do they take the particular, sometimes peculiar, spatial forms that they do? As researchers across the cognitive sciences pursue these questions on different levels--cultural, developmental--in diverse populations and with new methodologies, clear answers will depend upon a shared and nuanced set of theoretical distinctions.

Number concepts without number lines in an indigenous group of Papua New Guinea.

Background: The generic concept of number line, which maps numbers to unidimensional space, is a fundamental concept in mathematics, but its cognitive origins are uncertain. Two defining criteria of the number line are that (i) there is a mapping of each individual number (or numerosity) under consideration onto a specific location on the line, and (ii) that the mapping defines a unidimensional space representing numbers with a metric--a distance function. It has been proposed that the number line is based on a spontaneous universal human intuition, rooted directly in brain evolution, that maps number magnitude to linear space with a metric.

Contours of time: topographic construals of past, present, and future in the Yupno valley of Papua New Guinea.

Time, an everyday yet fundamentally abstract domain, is conceptualized in terms of space throughout the world's cultures. Linguists and psychologists have presented evidence of a widespread pattern in which deictic time-past, present, and future-is construed along the front/back axis, a construal that is linear and ego-based. To investigate the universality of this pattern, we studied the construal of deictic time among the Yupno, an indigenous group from the mountains of Papua New Guinea, whose language makes extensive use of allocentric topographic (uphill/downhill) terms for describing spatial relations.