Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans make sense of space in a variety of ways. We can locate the world relative to our bodies, for instance, and thus adopt an 'egocentric' frame of reference for space. Or we can locate the world relative to an external frame of reference --- the cardinal directions, perhaps, or salient geographical features such as mountains. Across contexts and cultures, people vary in the frame of reference they adopt to think and communicate about space. Here, we test an explanation of this diversity: Egocentric encoding is encouraged by dense urban environments, particularly when reasoning about small-scale space. We constructed a corpus of three decades of published studies of cross-cultural variation in spatial frames of reference (N > 7,000 participants). Multilevel Bayesian models confirmed that egocentric encoding is more common in cities (vs. rural environments) and for small-scale space. Our conceptualization of space is shaped by the spaces we inhabit.