Acceso usuarios
María Fernanda Marilicán Contreras, Paula Alonqueo Boudon, Eloy Oliva Vásquez
La representación espacial es relevante en la cognición humana, ya que es un dominio fuente que facilita la representación de dominios más abstractos como el tiempo. En la vida cotidiana, este hecho se expresa mediante la forma en que se habla del tiempo, gestos del discurso y aspectos culturales para describir el orden, la duración de los eventos y la espacialización en artefactos culturales como líneas de tiempo, gráficos, relojes y calendarios. El objetivo de este estudio fue describir la representación espacial del tiempo deíctico en tres grupos culturales: mapuche rurales, no indígenas urbanos y no indígenas rurales de entre 6 a 10 años (M = 8.5, DE = 1.29). Participaron 167 estudiantes, quienes respondieron a una tarea cognitiva de representación espacial de eventos temporales cotidianos. Se analizaron las diferencias grupales según tres alternativas de representación espacial unidimensional: sagital, horizontal y vertical. Los resultados mostraron que la representación sagital del tiempo, en la totalidad de la muestra, es significativamente mayor en los niños y niñas de mayor edad. Los escolares no indígenas rurales de 6 a 8 años utilizaron con mayor frecuencia la representación horizontal, mientras que los niños y niñas mapuche rurales utilizaron más la representación vertical. Se discuten estos resultados como un posible efecto de la escolarización en la construcción de las representaciones del tiempo.
Spatial representation is relevant in human cognition, since it is a source domain that facilitates the representation of more abstract domains such as time, which is an abstract entity that is not directly perceptible through the senses. In everyday life it is expressed through the way time is talked about, discourse gestures and cultural aspects to describe the order, duration of events and spatialization in cultural artifacts such as: timelines, graphs, clocks, and calendars.
The particularity of their manifestation varies according to cultural, linguistic, and personal aspects. The aim of this study was to describe the spatial representation of deictic time in three cultural groups: rural Mapuche, urban non-indigenous and rural non-indigenous 6 to 10 year-olds (M = 8.5, SD = 1.29). A total of 167 students participated, to whom the cognitive task of spatial representation of everyday temporal events “Deictic time” was applied, which has 6 trials consisting of the presentation of a flat stone (marker) that represents the deictic center (e.g., today, noon, month or current week) and with respect to which two stones (markers) representing a past and a future situation respectively (e.g., yesterday, tomorrow, next week, summer, afternoon, evening, night) must be arranged. The participants’ responses were coded by two independent researchers, on three variables: sagittality, horizontality, verticality.
Sagittality refers to the successive arrangement of the three temporal stimuli (stones) in a straight line. Horizontality is defined as the distribution of the temporal markers in the horizontal plane. Verticality refers to the arrangement of the temporal markers in the vertical plane. For all three variables the score ranged from 0 to 6 points. To determine the differences between rural Mapuche, rural non-indigenous and urban non-indigenous groups and to answer the specific objectives regarding the sagittal representation and the horizontal and vertical axes, factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to represent deictic time.
It was found that the sagittal representation of time is significantly higher in older schoolchildren. This finding could be explained by the effect of schooling: younger children have had less exposure to formal education and their ways of representation may retain cultural traces. On the other hand, non-indigenous rural students from 6 to 8 years of age use horizontality more frequently and rural Mapuche schoolchildren use the vertical axis more. This finding could account for a cultural variability in the spatial representation of time, in the Mapuche context and language the time interval in which the action takes place or took place is not relevant, but the focus is on how the event occurred and in which part of the cycle it occurred. The results differ according to the cultural group and rurality does not make a difference. These results are discussed as a possible effect of monocultural schooling in the construction of time representations, since a cultural variability is demonstrated in children, the conceptualization of time is not innate, but a notion has prevailed in postindustrial societies and in school a standard mental timeline. This implies that the representations of the time of the native peoples, to the extent that they deviate from the standard, they remain excluded from school knowledge since indigenous knowledge is not recognized as such. The knowledge, social and cultural frameworks that guide the Mapuche family education and the everyday life of people are formed in direct relation to nature and spirituality, while, in school education, knowledge is transmitted through classrooms and laboratories. Results are discussed as a possible cultural effect of schooling on the construction of deictic time representation.
