Abstract
Recent research shows that Chinese, when they gesture
about time, tend to put the past “ahead” and the future
“behind”. Do they think of time in the way as suggested by
their gestures? In this study we investigate whether Chinese
people explicitly have such past-in-front mappings. In
experiment 1 we show that when time conceptions are
constructed with neutral wording (without spatial
metaphors), Chinese people are more likely to have a pastin-front-mapping
than Spaniards. This could be due to
cultural differences in temporal focus of attention, in that
Chinese people are more past-oriented than Europeans.
However, additional experiments (2 & 3) show that,
independent of culture, Chinese people’s past-in-front
mapping is sensitive to the wording of sagittal spatial
metaphors. In comparison to a neutral condition, they have
more past-in-front mappings when time conceptions are
constructed with past-in-front spatial metaphors (“front
day”, means the day before yesterday), whereas fewer pastin-front
mappings are constructed with future-in-front
metaphors. There thus appear to be both long-term effects
of cultural attitudes on the spatialization of time, and also
immediate effects of the space-time metaphors used to
probe people’s mental representations.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 38th annual conference of the cognitive science society |
Editors | A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, J.C. Trueswell |
Publisher | Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society |
Pages | 2603-2608 |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |
Event | Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Philadelphia, United States Duration: 11 Aug 2016 → 14 Aug 2016 Conference number: 38th |
Conference
Conference | Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Philadelphia |
Period | 11/08/16 → 14/08/16 |