Abstract
Recent evidence has shown that the mental representation of time is “embodied”—time is expressed via the hands, the eyes, and the whole body. These findings suggest the existence of a manually reflected mental time line running (in Western culture) horizontally from left (past) to right (future) and an ocularly reflected mental time line running from left/down (past) to right/up (future). We addressed the question whether mental time is also reflected interpersonally and investigated whether an avatar’s face orientation (left vs. right) would facilitate a subject’s temporal processing in relation to the horizontal mental time line. In combination with a left- or right-gazing avatar, we presented a temporal auditory word (“gestern”—yesterday or “morgen”—tomorrow), and our subjects had to manually categorize the word as being either past- or future-related (classic left/right key-press paradigm). The stimulus–response (SR) mapping was either compatible (past word—left hand, future word—right hand) or incompatible (future word—left hand, past word—right hand). Responses were significantly faster in blocks with compatible versus incompatible mapping. Thus, our results provide clear evidence for manually reflected mental time running from left to right, even for temporal auditory words that are free of potential visual (reading direction) confounds. The presented interpersonal cues (avatar head orientation) facilitated the activation of the horizontal mental time line in blocks with incompatible SR-mapping but not in blocks with compatible (standard) mapping. We conclude that interpersonal cues exert weak effects on the spatial representation of mental time and can help to adapt context-specific mappings of temporal concepts.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Agnes Münch for programming and technical assistance, and Larissa Reis and Emanuel Naß for help with the data collection. We also thank Andrea Bizzeti (Phonogram Archive of the University of Zürich) for recording the audio word stimuli.
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Note that an earlier version of this manuscript is part of a doctoral thesis by the first author. The thesis is accessible via the following link: https://publications.ub.uni-mainz.de/theses/volltexte/2017/100001532/pdf/100001532.pdf.
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All procedures performed in our study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee—Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Institute of Psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität—and with the 1964 Declaration Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Prior to the study, the IRB had informed us that in accordance with the department’s ethics guidelines no explicit ethics vote of the IRB was necessary for our study, because we tested only healthy adult volunteers, only harmless visual stimuli were presented, the experiment did not cause physical or psychological stress, no physiological parameters were measured, no sensitive data like personality or clinical scales were collected, and no misleading or wrong information was given to the participants.
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Handling editor: Juan Lupianez (University of Granada); Reviewers: Marc Ouellet (University of Granada), Pom Charras (University Paul Valery Montpellier), Luca Rinaldi (University of Milano-Bicocca).
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Thönes, S., Stocker, K., Brugger, P. et al. Is mental time embodied interpersonally?. Cogn Process 19, 419–427 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-018-0857-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-018-0857-6