CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Steven C. Levinson (Director, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), March 1, 2004, at 4PM (352 Haines Hall).

"Diversity in Human Spatial Cognition: Where Prehistory, Culture, Language and Biology Meet"

In comparative perspective, native human spatial abilities are unspectacular - we don't remotely approach the levels in migratory species, or even match your average arthropod! Yet humans are wanderers, and rapidly colonized the earth. How to reconcile this mismatch?

Investigation shows that human spatial abilities vary dramatically cross-culturally. I'll illustrate this with data from a number of traditional groups around the world, concentrating on two very different cognitive styles in spatial reckoning. It turns out that the best predictor of the variation is language, rather than, say, subsistence mode or ecology. Thus the gap between our native abilities and our advanced navigational capabilities is filled by what Goody has called 'a technology of the intellect', mental tricks propagated through language and gesture in particular, and culture in general.

These findings have quite wide potential application to the analysis of cultural facts and archaeological data. They also have implications for how we think about human evolution - they suggest a trade-off between cultural and biological adaptation.