Plasticity of human spatial cognition: Spatial language and cognition covary across cultures

The present paper explores cross-cultural variation in spatial cognition by comparing spa-tial reconstruction tasks by Dutch and Namibian elementary school children. These twocommunities differ in the way they predominantly express spatial relations in language.Four experiments investigate cognitive strategy preferences across different levels oftask-complexity and instruction. Data show a correlation between dominant linguistic spa-tial frames of reference and performance patterns in non-linguistic spatial memory tasks.This correlation is shown to be stable across an increase of complexity in the spatial array.When instructed to use their respective non-habitual cognitive strategy, participants werenot easily able to switch between strategies and their attempts to do so impaired their per-formance. These results indicate a difference not only in preference but also in competenceand suggest that spatial language and non-linguistic preferences and competences in spa-tial cognition are systematically aligned across human populations