When time is space: Evidence for a mental time line

Abstract

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. Author's personal copy Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36 (2012) 2257-2273 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirectNeuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews For instance, time-space interactions have been described as a strong preference to associate the past with the left space and the future with the right space. Here we review the growing evidence of interactions between time and space processing, systematized according to the type of interaction being investigated. We present the empirical findings supporting the possibility that humans represent the subjective time flow on a spatially oriented "mental time line" that is accessed through spatial attention mechanisms. The heterogeneous time-space interactions are then compared with the number-space interactions described in the numerical cognition literature. An alternative hypothesis, which maintains a common system for magnitude processing, including time, space, and number, is also discussed. Finally, we extend the discussion to the more general issue of how the representation of these concepts might be grounded into the cortical circuits that support spatial attention and sensorimotor transformations.

Space and time in the sighted and blind

“…These findings contrast with those of an analogous study on the spatial mapping of number (Crollen et al 2013) showing that the mental number line depends on different spatial coordinates in the sighted (external FoR) and the blind (anatomical FoR). It has remained an open question whether the spatial mappings of number and time are truly distinct, or whether they are manifestations of a single propensity to represent continuous information from abstract domains along a spatial continuum (Bonato et al 2012;Walsh, 2003).…”

“…Other cultural conventions that tend to covary with orthography may also contribute to this space-time association; these may include graphic representation of time in calendars and graphs, temporal sequences in comic strips, and spontaneous gestures toward the past or the future. Crucially, all of this information is acquired visually, suggesting that visual input plays an important role in shaping the MTL (Bonato, Zorzi & Umiltà, 2012), at least in the people who have been tested to date. Yet, it is unclear whether visual experience per se is an "active ingredient" in the development of the MTL.…”

Separate mechanisms for magnitude and order processing in the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect: The strange case of musical note values.

“…We will call this hypothesis "order prediction" from now on. The magnitude prediction hypothesis is supported by a large number of studies investigating the STEARC effect (i.e., SpatialTemporal Association of Response Codes), that revealed a spatial-temporal association with short durations linked to the left space and long durations linked to the right space (Bonato, Zorzi & Umiltà, 2012;Bono, Grazia, Casarotti, Priftis, Gava, Umiltà & Zorzi, 2012;Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008;Fabbri, Cancellieri & Natale, 2012;Fabbri, Cellini, Martoni, Tonetti & Natale, 2013;Ishihara, Keller, Rossetti & Prinz, 2008;Vallesi et al, 2008;Vallesi et al, 2011).…”

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

“…This congruency effect implies that time is mentally represented along a line, extending horizontally from left to right. Further studies have supported the existence of this ''mental time-line'' (for an overview, see Bonato et al 2012 andBoroditsky et al 2010) and have shown that the correspondence of time and space depends on the direction of reading (Fuhrman et al 2011;Fuhrman and Boroditsky 2010;Tversky et al 1991). Specifically, whereas left-to-right readers (e.g., English and Mandarin speakers) place the past on the left and the future on the right, right-toleft readers (e.g., Hebrew speakers) show the reverse spacetime mapping.…”