Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To think about objects' locations, people adopt a spatial frame of reference anchored either to their own body (egocentric; e.g., left vs. right) or to something external (allocentric; e.g., cardinal directions). Within cultures, people habitually rely on the same frame of reference, manifested in language, gesture, and memory. How are these norms transmitted? One account, linguistic relativity, argues they are transmitted through language. Here we explore a complementary route: gesture. In a between-subjects experiment (N = 70), we manipulated the spatial frame of reference used in gesture to describe table-top locations. As predicted, participants reliably adopted this frame of reference in a subsequent spatial search task, even after the speaker stopped gesturing. This suggests that a speaker's gesture has the capacity to reshape listeners' spatial reasoning. We argue that this offers a mechanism for "gestural relativity," which we consider in light of a larger cognitive-ecological perspective on spatial cognition.