Spatial region concepts such as “front,” “back,” “left,” and “right” reflect our typical interaction with space, and the corresponding surrounding regions have different statuses in memory. We examined the representation of spatial directions in the auditory space, specifically in how far natural response actions, such as orientation movements toward a sound source, would affect the categorization of egocentric auditory space. While standing in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants were presented acoustic stimuli coming from the loudspeakers in (...) randomized order, and verbally described their directions by using the concept labels “front,” “back,” “left,” “right,” “front-right,” “front-left,” “back-right,” and “back-left.” Response actions varied in three blocked conditions: (1) facing front, (2) turning the head and upper body to face the stimulus, and (3) turning the head and upper body plus pointing with the hand and outstretched arm toward the stimulus. In addition to a protocol of the verbal utterances, motion capture and video recording generated a detailed corpus for subsequent analysis of the participants’ behavior. Chi-square tests revealed an effect of response condition for directions within the left and right sides. We conclude that movement-based response actions influence the representation of auditory space, especially within the sides’ regions. Moreover, the representation of auditory space favors the front and the back regions in terms of resolution, which is possibly related to the physiological characteristics of the human auditory system, as well as to the ecological requirements of action control in the different regions. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) (...) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought. (shrink)

What role does language play during attention allocation in perceiving and remembering events? We recorded adults‟ eye movements as they studied animated motion events for a later recognition task. We compared native speakers of two languages that use different means of expressing motion (Greek and English). In Experiment 1, eye movements revealed that, when event encoding was made difficult by requiring a concurrent task that did not involve language (tapping), participants spent extra time studying what their language treats as the (...) details of the event. This „linguistic encoding‟ effect was eliminated both when event encoding was made easier (no concurrent task) and when the concurrent task required the use of language (counting aloud). In Experiment 2, under conditions of a delayed concurrent task of counting aloud, participants used language covertly just prior to engaging in the additional task. Together, the results indicate that language can be optionally recruited for encoding events, especially under conditions of high cognitive load. Yet, these effects are malleable and flexible and do not appear to shape core biases in event perception and memory. (shrink)

Observers spontaneously segment larger activities into smaller events. For example, “washing a car” might be segmented into “scrubbing,” “rinsing,” and “drying” the car. This process, called event segmentation, separates “what is happening now” from “what just happened.” In this study, we show that event segmentation predicts activity in the hippocampus when people access recent information. Participants watched narrative film and occasionally attempted to retrieve from memory objects that recently appeared in the film. The delay between object presentation and test was (...) always 5 sec. Critically, for some of the objects, the event changed during the delay whereas for others the event continued. Using fMRI, we examined whether retrieval-related brain activity differed when the event changed during the delay. Brain regions involved in remembering past experiences over long periods, including the hippocampus, were more active during retrieval when the event changed during the delay. Thus, the way an object encountered just 5 sec ago is retrieved from memory appears to depend in part on what happened in those 5 sec. These data strongly suggest that the segmentation of ongoing activity into events is a control process that regulates when memory for events is updated. (shrink)