London, Dec 21 (IANS) One’s cultural affiliations have a bearing on the way one dances, according to a new study.
The way people remember dance moves depends on the culture they come from, the study says.

Whereas a German or other Westerners might think in terms of ’step to the right, step to the left,’ a nomadic hunter-gatherer from Namibia might think something more like ’step to the east, step to the west’.

Those differences aren’t just a matter of language; rather, they reflect differences in the way the mind encodes and remembers spatial relationships.

“The human mind varies more across cultures than we generally assume,” said Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Research Group for Comparative Cognitive Anthropology.

“Even everyday tasks that we would never think of doing any other way, like remembering body movements, are done differently in other places,” Haun added.

The researchers conducted experiments in which they asked groups of German children and Haikom kids from Namibia to learn a dance.

German children who successfully learned the dance almost always moved their hands to their right-left-right-right, regardless of which direction they were facing, says a Max Planck release.

Conversely, Haikom children switched the direction of their movements, from right-left-right-right to left-right-left-left, depending on which way they were facing at the time.

The new findings, published in Current Biology, highlight the extraordinary diversity and flexibility of the human mind, the researchers say.