By Emma Wu
While organizing items, everyone tends to place them smallest to largest, left to right. Why is that? This has been a debate for years whether or not this placement is innate or learned. Researchers have tried finding clues for years to find the basis behind the spatial reasoning that we use to organize things. Recently, they seem to have found the clue. Culture may be the reason behind the way we organize. Instinctively, we organize in one direction. Many human constructs, such as size, time, and numbers extend in one direction. However, which direction seems to depend on the person and the environmental factors acting on them.
Researchers performed a study with US adults and preschoolers and Tsimane adults and teens, also known as Bolivians. They found that US adults almost always mapped objects smallest to largest, from left to right. However, Tsimane adults and US preschoolers showed equally likely tendencies to map in either direction.
In another study, with Tsimane teens and adults were asked to map objects in an x, y, z plane, or mapping in all directions. They found that there were no biases to any particular direction. They mapped in almost all directions, showing that there was no universal innate tendency to map from left to right. Therefore, this led to many doubts being raised on the idea of innate spatial reasoning and mapping.
However, a cognitive scientist, Stella Lourenco, points out some consistencies within the data from the Tsimane studies. She points out that about 80% of the time Tsimane participants did map in one direction. This does point towards consistency, therefore, she put forth her theory. Babies are born with innate mental maps, however, these mental maps are overridden by environmental factors. Whatever a person is exposed to from when they were born, this becomes a tendency to replicate. For example, Arabic readers, who write and read from right to left, place objects small to large, from right to left. This is in direct opposition to the US, where reading and writing occurs from left to right. This translates to placing objects of smaller size on the left, increasing size to the right.
As can be seen, environmental factors, generally within the culture, is what leads to the difference in mapping. However, it is still unknown whether some mapping tendencies are due to innate tendencies or solely due to environmental factors. Regardless, the effect of one’s environment is profound on the impact of our thoughts.
