Time does not flow without language: Spatial distance affects temporal duration regardless of movement or direction

Cai, Zhenguang G., Connell, Louise and Holler, Judith (2013) Time does not flow without language: Spatial distance affects temporal duration regardless of movement or direction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20 (5). 973–980. ISSN 1069-9384

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Abstract

Much evidence has suggested that people conceive of time as flowing directionally in transverse space (e.g., from left to right for English speakers). However, this phenomenon has never been tested in a fully nonlinguistic paradigm where neither stimuli nor task use linguistic labels, which raises the possibility that time is directional only when reading/writing direction has been evoked. In the present study, English-speaking participants viewed a video where an actor sang a note while gesturing and reproduced the duration of the sung note by pressing a button. Results showed that the perceived duration of the note was increased by a long-distance gesture, relative to a short-distance gesture. This effect was equally strong for gestures moving from left to right and from right to left and was not dependent on gestures depicting movement through space; a weaker version of the effect emerged with static gestures depicting spatial distance. Since both our gesture stimuli and temporal reproduction task were nonlinguistic, we conclude that the spatial representation of time is nondirectional: Movement contributes, but is not necessary, to the representation of temporal information in a transverse timeline.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: time perception,space,metaphor,embodied cognition,gesture
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 29 Nov 2016 00:01
Last Modified: 21 Oct 2022 08:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/61511
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0414-3

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