Walking on a mental time line: Temporal processing affects step movements along the sagittal space

Rinaldi, Luca; Locati, Francesca; Parolin, Laura; Bernardi, Nicolò Francesco; Girelli, Luisa

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2016.02.013

Cited by 30 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…They are also faster to make past-future judgments to words shown in front of an image of a person for future concepts and behind for past concepts (Torralbo, Santiago, & Lupi añez, 2006). In addition, people are faster to step forward when they hear words related to the future than the past and faster to step backward for the past than the future (Rinaldi, Locati, Parolin, Bernardi, & Girelli, 2016). In a deliberate gesture task, they gesture to the front when talking about the future and the back when talking about the past (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012).…”

Section: Spatiotemporal Metaphor: a Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Space–Time Metaphors Foster New Nonlinguistic Representations

Hendricks

Boroditsky

2017

Topics in Cognitive Science

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What is the role of language in constructing knowledge? In this article, we ask whether learning new relational language can create new ways of thinking. In Experiment 1, we taught English speakers to talk about time using new vertical linguistic metaphors, saying things like "breakfast is above dinner" or "breakfast is below dinner" (depending on condition). In Experiment 2, rather than teaching people new metaphors, we relied on the left-right representations of time that our American college student participants have already internalized through a lifetime of visuospatial experience reading and writing text from left to right. In both experiments, we asked whether the representations (whether newly acquired from metaphor or acquired over many years of visuospatial experience) are susceptible to verbal interference. We found that (a) learning new metaphors created new space-time associations that could be detected in a nonlinguistic implicit association task; (b) these newly learned representations were not susceptible to verbal interference; and (c) with respect to both verbal and visual interference, representations newly learned from linguistic metaphor behaved just like those on the left-right axis that our participants had acquired through years of visuospatial experience. Taken together, these results suggest that learning new relational language can be a powerful tool in constructing new representations and expanding our cognitive repertoire.

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Section: Spatiotemporal Metaphor: a Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Space–Time Metaphors Foster New Nonlinguistic Representations

Hendricks

Boroditsky

2017

Topics in Cognitive Science

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“…Closely related to this is the concept of the subjective time line (e.g. Hartmann & Mast, 2012;Rinaldi, Locati, Parolin, Bernardi & Girelli, 2016)-an imaginary line which orders our experience by passing through our body centrally in both directions with the future portion extending in front of the body and the past portion extending to the back. Although not universal, the association between the past and the dorsal space is an inherent part of many cultures (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It takes me back: The mnemonic time-travel effect

et al. 2019

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Given the links between motion and temporal thinking, it is surprising that no studies have examined the possibility that transporting participants back mentally towards the time of encoding could improve memory. Six experiments investigated whether backward motion would promote recall relative to forward motion or no-motion conditions. Participants saw a video of a staged crime (Experiments 1, 3 and 5), a word list (Experiments 2 and 4) or a set of pictures (Experiment 6). Then, they walked forward or backwards (Experiments 1 and 2), watched a forward-or backward-directed optic flow-inducing video (Experiments 3 and 4) or imagined walking forward or backwards (Experiments 5 and 6). Finally, they answered questions about the video or recalled words or pictures. The results demonstrated for the first time that motion-induced past-directed mental time travel improved mnemonic performance for different types of information. We briefly discuss theoretical and practical implications of this "mnemonic time-travel effect".

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“…Consistent with this, Rinaldi and colleagues have argued that the sagittal mental time line directly arises from visual experience encountered through locomotion: as people move through their environments they see future events approach while past events are literally behind them (Rinaldi et al, 2016;Rinaldi, Vecchi, Fantino, Merabet, & Cattaneo, 2018). First, one might predict that sagittal gestures would be particularly frequent in children.…”

Section: Developmental Predictions Regarding Time-space Gesturesmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The existence of linguistic communities in which the past in mapped to the front of the body and the future behind the body (N uñez & Sweetser, 2006) already suggests that sagittal representations of time are not necessarily grounded in sensorimotor experience in the way that Rinaldi and colleagues have argued (Rinaldi et al, 2016(Rinaldi et al, , 2018. The existence of linguistic communities in which the past in mapped to the front of the body and the future behind the body (N uñez & Sweetser, 2006) already suggests that sagittal representations of time are not necessarily grounded in sensorimotor experience in the way that Rinaldi and colleagues have argued (Rinaldi et al, 2016(Rinaldi et al, , 2018.…”

Section: Developmental Predictions Regarding Time-space Gesturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space–Time Mappings

et al. 2019

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Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., “I'm looking forward to the weekend”). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space–time metaphors. In this study, we examined the gestures that English‐speaking 6‐to‐7‐year‐olds, 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds, 13‐to‐15‐year‐olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., “tomorrow” versus “yesterday”) and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6‐to‐7‐year‐old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front‐back) axis than in the lateral (left‐right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space–time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures.

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Walking on a mental time line: Temporal processing affects step movements along the sagittal space

Cited by 30 publications

References 14 publications

New Space–Time Metaphors Foster New Nonlinguistic Representations

New Space–Time Metaphors Foster New Nonlinguistic Representations

It takes me back: The mnemonic time-travel effect

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space–Time Mappings

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