Varanasi represents in many ways our main research location, where our procedures were pre-tested, and decisions were made. It is hence also the site for which our research has the largest range of components, in particular the study of neurophysiological correlates and of brain-damaged patients presented in chapter 13 and a study of dead reckoning in chapter 14. In this chapter, we present the main results, those that are comparable to the other locations.

It will be remembered from chapter 3, that the language spoken in Varanasi is Hindi and the geocentric orientation system uses cardinal directions (NSEW), although the results of our first study (chapter 4) have shown that egocentric references are also used, particularly by older children (11 to 15 years), which is why we chose to work with this age group in the main study. The sample characteristics are presented in Table 6.1.

From the total sample of 376 children, we initially tried to select 80 children who would fall most clearly into geocentric (G) and egocentric (E) sub-groups. However, we found relatively little overlap between a selection based on G and E language, and one based on G and E encoding, and it proved difficult to select homogeneous sub-groups. Therefore, instead of contrasting two sub-groups, we prefer to work with the whole range of variation. There remains one trace of this initial design, which is that background data through child interviews were collected only with the selected 80 children and family interviews with 66 of these.