Introduction

“Put the knife to the north side of the plate, and the fork south!” To many readers of this book, this motherly instruction to her child will seem rather bizarre. Why not right and left of the plate? Because this mother is using a “geocentric” frame of spatial reference (FoR) instead of an egocentric one; in other words, she is using a large-scale orientation system (such as cardinal directions, but there are others) to talk about small-scale table-top space inside a room. While it is possible to do this in English, it is hardly ever done and comes across as strange. In some other languages, however, like Balinese, Hindi or Nepali, it would not sound strange at all; in fact, it is standard practice, and could be heard by any child old enough to set the table.

How do children learn to use a geocentric FoR? This question has never been addressed in mainstream developmental psychology, because a geocentric FoR is quite unfamiliar to Western children and psychologists alike. They may use a geocentric frame when navigating in a North American city laid out in a grid pattern, or on interstate highways, or when map reading, but not when talking about the location of objects inside a house. Yet many of the children in Bali, in India or in Nepal where we carried out our research (and in several other locations world-wide studied by Levinson, 2003, and his colleagues) use a geocentric FoR with ease.