Several reaction time (RT) studies report faster responses when responses to temporal information are arranged in a spatially congruent manner than when this arrangement is incongruent. The resulting space–time congruency effect is commonly attributed to a culturally salient localization of temporal information along a mental timeline (e.g., a mental timeline that runs from left to right). The present study aims to provide a compilation of the published RT studies on this time–space association in order to estimate the size of its effect and the extent of potential publication bias in this field of research. In this meta‐analysis, three types of task are distinguished due to hitherto existing empirical findings. These findings suggest that the extent to which time is made relevant to the experimental task has a systematic impact on whether or not the mental timeline is activated. The results of this meta‐analysis corroborate these considerations: First, experiments that make time a task‐relevant dimension have a mean effect size of d = 0.46. Second, in experiments in which time is task irrelevant, the effect size does not significantly deviate from zero. Third, temporal priming studies have a surprisingly high mean effect size of d = 0.47, which, however, should be adjusted to d = 0.36 due to publication bias.
The present study is a replication of Sell and Kaschak's (2011) Experiment 1 (Movement Condition). The original stimulus material (short texts compromising three sentences) was translated from English into German. We successfully replicated the basic congruency effect of the original study, that is, the interaction effect between direction of manual response and time reference when participants perform a sensicality judgment. In contrast to the original study, this congruency effect was not significantly modulated by the magnitude of time shift. Nevertheless, when the congruency effect was evaluated separately for large and small time shifts, it was significant for large but not for small time shifts. In sum, this replication reinforces the basic conclusion by Sell and Kaschak that the timeline becomes automatically activated when processing temporal sentence information, especially when the time shift is large.
The human ability to keep track of time can be distorted by several non-temporal stimulus aspects such as size or intensity. First studies indicate that not only physical but also implicit stimulus aspects can affect duration estimates. The present study expands these findings by investigating the effects of linguistic expressions including speed and duration information via temporal reproduction (Experiments 1 and 2) and temporal bisection tasks (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, implicit duration was manipulated by combining verbs that denote slow or fast motion with a path expression (to stroll to school vs. to spurt to school). Reproduced durations were consistent with an effect of implicit duration but not implicit speed. To control whether implicit speed affects perceived duration when exempted from duration information, single manner of motion verbs were presented in Experiments 2 and 3. The results speak against an effect of implicit speed analogous to physical speed.
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