One Action, Two Reference Frames: Compound Cognitive Maps of Object Location
研究通过实验发现，人们在放置物体时会同时使用基于身体和基于环境的两种参考框架，分别决定物体的左右和前后位置，这种复合认知地图在跨文化样本中普遍存在。
To navigate complex physical environments, animals keep track of the spatial relations among objects using various reference frames, both body-based (e.g., left/right) and environment-based (e.g., east/west), but how these spatial representations interact remains unresolved. Whereas neuroscientific findings show habitual integration across reference frames, psycholinguistic accounts suggest humans use one reference frame at a time, as in speech. This article examines whether people spontaneously use two reference frames in the same action. When placing a single object in a two-dimensional array, adult participants ( N = 110) routinely used an environment-based frame to determine the object’s left–right position while using a body-based frame to determine its front–back position at the same time. Such hybrid responses were prevalent among both Indigenous Tsimane’ and educated U.S. participants, suggesting that people across cultures habitually construct compound cognitive maps to represent the multidimensional spatial relations that compose natural settings.