Congruity Effects in Time and Space: Behavioral and ERP Measures

Abstract

Two experiments investigated whether motion metaphors for time affected the perception of spatial motion. Participants read sentences either about literal motion through space or metaphorical motion through time written from either the ego-moving or object-moving perspective. Each sentence was followed by a cartoon clip. Smiley-moving clips showed an iconic happy face moving toward a polygon, and shape-moving clips showed a polygon moving toward a happy face. In Experiment 1, using an explicit judgment task, participants judged smiley-moving cartoons as related to ego-moving sentences about space and about time, and shape-moving cartoons as related to object-moving sentences. In Experiment 2, participants viewed the same stimuli, but the cartoons were task-irrelevant. Eventrelated brain potentials revealed an early attentional effect of congruity on cartoons following sentences about space, and a later semantic effect on cartoons following sentences about time. Results are most consistent with accounts that posit differences in the processing of novel and conventional metaphors.

Contextual effects on conceptual blending in metaphors: An event-related potential study

“…We also included varying degrees of conceptual mapping in the experimental paradigm and our analysis revealed an amplitude difference that might arise from different degrees of mapping. Therefore, the results also offer evidence in support of the conceptual blending theory (Coulson & Van Petten, 2002;Fauconnier & Turner, 1998;Teuscher et al, 2008). The results support the theory by showing that literal and metaphorical sentences both involve mapping and that the mapping degree associates with the P600 amplitude.…”

“…The Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) proposes that both literal and metaphoric expressions involve the construction of multiple cognitive models and establishment of mappings between the conceptual components in both target and source domains (Coulson & Van Petten, 2002;Fauconnier & Turner, 1998;Teuscher et al, 2008). For instance, in order to understand the sentence "That stone we saw in the natural history museum is a gem", a mapping must be established between a gem and the stone we saw in the natural history museum.…”

“…The non-obvious semantic relationships between the agent (e.g., Beth in Beth is a peach) and theme (e.g., peach in Beth is a peach) in metaphors are also expected to cause semantic processing difficulty. Based on these reasons, ERP research on metaphors has predominantly focused on semantic integration difficulty, typically associated with the N400, though research has observed the P600 usually occurs along with N400 in metaphor comprehension (Coulson & Van Petten, 2002;Pynte, Besson, Robichon, & Poli, 1996;Sotillo et al, 2005;Teuscher, McQuire, Collins, & Coulson, 2008). A few studies have focused on hemispheric lateralization, which has also been considered to indicate processing difficulty in non-literal language comprehension (Arzouan, Goldstein, & Faust, 2007;Coulson & Van Petten, 2002Sotillo et al, 2005).…”

Complementarity of Space and Time in Distance Representations

“…Such a presumption is by no means unusual since earlier cognitive studies have found that spatiotemporal reasoning is affected by conceptualizations of real, imagined, and fictive motion in physical and non-physical domains (Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002;Matlock et al, 2005;Teuscher, McQuire, Collins & Coulson, 2008;see Ramscar, Matlock & Boroditsky, 2010 for a review).…”

Attentional Factors in Conceptual Congruency

“…However, effects of temporal primes on spatial judgments have been found using a variety of paradigms and measures by Teuscher, McQuire, Collins, and Coulson (2008) and Ouellet, Santiago, Funes, and Lupiáñez (2010). The main problem of these cross-study comparisons to evaluate the degree of asymmetry of the effects is the diversity in tasks and measures.…”