An Empirical Investigation into Spatial Reference Frame Taxonomy using Dialogue

Reference frames are abstract representations that enable people to describe the location of objects using projective descriptions such as, above, below, left, and right. There have typically been three broad classes of reference frames identified in the literature: Those that are based upon the environment, those based upon an object and those that are egocentric. However, the exact details of reference frame classification have been disputed. In this paper we present two experiments that used a confederate priming paradigm that set out to distinguish between the Traditional taxonomy and Levinson’s taxonomy of reference frames. The results provide evidence supporting the Traditional taxonomy of reference frames. We suggest possibilities for further investigations of reference frame alignment.