ArticleScience advances2021
Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Neural networks underlying magnitude perception: a specific meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Pooled it
- Exploring foot-based SNARC effect by hand posture: insights from embodied cognition.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Woman Up!: Vertical Metaphors for Gender in Chinese Bai Practitioners of Azhaliism.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- The Effect of Writing Direction and Task-Specific Experience on Mapping Time and Numbers on Space.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- One test, many tongues: Surveying language proficiency across the globe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Spatial representation of magnitude in rhesus macaques: Investigating SNARC effects in quantity and size dimensions.Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- A left-to-right bias in number-space mapping across ages and cultures.Nature communications · 2025Article
- No clear evidence for an innate left-to-right mental number line.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Trend judgment as a perceptual building block of graphicacy and mathematics, across age, education, and culture.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Spatial metaphors and the design of everyday things.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In industrialized groups, adults implicitly map numbers, time, and size onto space according to cultural practices like reading and counting (e.g., from left to right). Here, we tested the mental mappings of the Tsimane', an indigenous population with few such cultural practices. Tsimane' adults spatially arranged number, size, and time stimuli according to their relative magnitudes but showed no directional bias for any domain on any spatial axis; different mappings went in different directions, even in the same participant. These findings challenge claims that people have an innate left-to-right mapping of numbers and that these mappings arise from a domain-general magnitude system. Rather, the direction-specific mappings found in industrialized cultures may originate from direction-agnostic mappings that reflect the correlational structure of the natural world.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.