Reddit mentions of Caves in Context: The Cultural Significance of Caves and Rockshelters in Europe

That's a somewhat loose use of the word, but ok. Also, since, like, half the top level posts are asking for clarification about what you're talking about, you may want to improve your original post.

Anyway, this:

>Why does a cave seem to elicit near-identical responses regardless of culture? What cognitive triggers are these designers tripping, and how? Are they doing it deliberately or are they just tapping a rich vein of hard-wired neural responses without understanding how it works?

isn't actually a question about games. It's a question about cultural anthropology or perhaps psychology. Nor is it a given that your assertion that "a cave seem[s] to elicit near-identical responses regardless of culture," is actually true. Perhaps you should begin with a book that looks at it from a cave studies perspective. Caves also occur symbolically in Jungian psychology, but you can probably trace it through a variety of other works, including mythic use (or, more generally, underworlds).