Space (and Time) for Culture

• Andrea Bender, Department of Psychology, Freiburg University, Germany
• Sieghard Beller, Department of Psychology, Freiburg University, Germany
• Giobanni Bennardo, Dep. of Anthropology, Northern Illinois University, USA
• Niclas Burenhult, Lund University, Sweden, & MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• Lisa Hüther, Department of Psychology, Freiburg University, Germany
• Kirill Istomin, MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany
• Olivier Le Guen, CIESAS, México DF, Mexico
• Thora Tenbrink, SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition, Bremen University, Germany

Abstract

Space is a fundamental domain for cognition, and research on spatial perception, orientation, referencing, and reasoning addresses core questions in most of the disciplines that make up the cognitive sciences. Consequently, space represents one of those domains for which various disciplinary interests overlap to a substantial extent. For instance, the question of whether and how spatial cognition and language interact has been one of the core questions since early on (e.g., Clark, 1973; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976), and yet, consensus between psychologists and linguists is difficult to achieve (e.g., Li & Gleitman, 2002, vs. Levinson et al., 2002). Perhaps most controversial in this dispute is the extent to which spatial cognition is culturally variable (for linguistic variability, see also Evans & Levinson, 2009, and comments there-in).

• The Paper: Space (and Time) for Culture

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