Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When referring to spatial arrangements of two objects in the visual field, German native speakers prefer reflectionas a subtype of the relative frame of reference. Whether this preference transfers to objects in one’s back and whether a mentalturn has to precede such dorsal references (turn hypothesis), has recently been explored in studies implementing questionnaires.However, the results hardly supported the turn hypothesis and rather suggested backward projection as an alternative strategy fordorsal references. To test the two assumptions more rigorously, a series of experiments implemented dorsal object arrangementsin interview situations and induced dorsal perspectives via turning, shifting or reflecting the actual view of participants. Acrossexperiments and conditions, backward projection consistently emerged as the preferred referencing strategy and only a smallproportion of dorsal references accorded with the turn hypothesis. Participants’ retrospective descriptions supported this patternand suggested backward projection to be involved in dorsal referencing.