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Rafael Núñez and colleagues studied how members of the Yupno, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, conceptualize time. The researchers recorded Yupno speakers explaining certain temporal words and phrases, such as abjuk, a present-oriented expression that translates to "now," and coded each speaker's manual gestures. Previous research has found a tendency in many cultures to make temporal distinctions using spatial concepts and gestures, particularly along egocentric axes (i.e., relative to the orientation of the speaker): for instance, English speakers often refer to the front/back axis to describe events in time. In an anthropology paper, a student claims that the tendency toward ego-based conceptualizations of time is universal.