Culturally-driven spatial biases affect the way people interact with and think about the world. We examine the ways in which spatial presentation of stimuli affects learning and memory in preschool-aged children in the USA and Israel. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in both cultures were given a spatial search task in which they were asked to utilize verbal labels (letters of the alphabet) to match the hiding locations of two monkeys. The labels were taught to the children in either a left-to-right or right-to-left fashion to assess whether performance on this task is affected by directionality of labeling. English-speaking children performed better on the spatial search task when locations were labeled in a left-to-right fashion, while Hebrew-speaking children exhibited higher performance when labels were taught in a right-to-left fashion. In Experiment 2, English-speaking preschoolers were given a modified task in which the verbal label was a non-ordinal stimulus type (colors). These children showed no subsequent advantage on the task for spatial presentations which were culturally-consistent (left-to-right) relative to culturally-inconsistent (right-to-left). These findings support the hypothesis that culturally-consistent spatial layout improves learning and memory, and that this benefit is reduced or absent when information lacks ordinal properties.

中文翻译：

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学龄前儿童有序和非有序维度空间搜索策略中的文化驱动偏见

文化驱动的空间偏见会影响人们与世界互动和思考世界的方式。我们研究了刺激的空间表现如何影响美国和以色列学龄前儿童的学习和记忆。在实验 1 中，两种文化中的学龄前儿童都接受了一项空间搜索任务，要求他们使用语言标签（字母表）来匹配两只猴子的藏身地点。标签以从左到右或从右到左的方式教给孩子们，以评估这项任务的表现是否受标签方向的影响。当以从左到右的方式标记位置时，讲英语的儿童在空间搜索任务中表现更好，而当以从右到左的方式教授标签时，讲希伯来语的儿童表现出更高的表现。在实验 2 中，给说英语的学龄前儿童一个修改过的任务，其中语言标签是非序数刺激类型（颜色）。这些儿童在文化上一致（从左到右）相对于文化上不一致（从右到左）的空间呈现任务中没有表现出随后的优势。这些发现支持了这样的假设，即文化一致的空间布局可以改善学习和记忆，并且当信息缺乏有序属性时，这种好处会减少或不存在。