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Across Cultures, People Combine Reference Frames to Orient Themselves [psychologicalscience.org]:

When walking through an unfamiliar city, we might rely on different types of directions. Head east out of the train station, take a left at the stop light, turn at the building with the mural.

To move through complex environments and keep track of where objects are, people use reference points either in relation to their own body (for example, to their left) or based on features of their environment (next to the window, across from the door).

As someone moves around, the body-based references, called egocentric reference frames, may change, whereas the environmental references, allocentric reference frames, stay the same. For instance, a tree on the left when walking in one direction is on the right when walking in the other direction, but the tree is always next to the mailbox.

Different cultures use different reference frames, perhaps as a product of language. Americans, who are thought to prefer body-based references, tend to talk egocentrically.

"We say things like, 'You have some food on your left cheek,'" said Benjamin Pitt, a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, in an interview with the Observer. "We would never say that you have some food on your down-river cheek or on your east cheek, but other cultures do."

Additionally, the physical reality of where we live influences our frames of reference. Rather than looking left and right to cross a street, people growing up in the Amazon rainforest cross rivers by looking upriver to check for hazards.

In the natural world, "There's really no reason or very little reason to keep track of left–right spatial distinctions," said Pitt. "Instead, there's good reasons to keep track of allocentric spatial distinctions. It's all about where things are in the environment, and the environment tends to not be organized with respect to our bodies."

[...] Pitt suspects people use different references for left–right and front–back because keeping track of left–right spatial distinctions is harder.

"We have expressions like, 'No, your other left,'" said Pitt. "Nobody is confusing their front from their back. Nobody's like, 'No, your other front.' It's so completely obvious, which is your front and which is your back."

For those more difficult left–right distinctions, people may abandon body-based references for easier environmental references.

"You can just pick something in the environment that's sitting there staring at you," said Pitt. "You don't have to worry about whether it was on your left or your right because that's too confusing."

But people don't use environment-based references for everything. It seems a combination is best, regardless of where you live.

"If you want to move your body through the world, then you're going to need to integrate these things," Pitt said.

Journal Reference: Pitt, B. (2025). One action, two reference frames: Compound cognitive maps of object location. Psychological Science, 36(11), 862–873. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976251391172 [doi.org]

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