Mirror Reading Can Reverse the Flow of Time.
How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some cultures but on the left in others. Here we investigated whether expe...
| Published in: | Journal of Experimental Psychology. General Vol. 143; no. 2; pp. 473 - 480 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
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American Psychological Association
Apr2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=95397119&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 95397119 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00963445 EPG jtl: Journal of Experimental Psychology. General issn: 00963445 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Apr2014 vid: 143 iid: 2 pid: 34 pub: American Psychological Association artinfo: ui: 95397119 10.1037/a0033297 ppf: 473 ppct: 7 formats: tig: atl: Mirror Reading Can Reverse the Flow of Time. aug: au: Casasanto, Daniel Bottini, Roberto affil: University of Chicago University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy su: Metaphor Mirror-writing Orthography & spelling Representation (Philosophy) Analytic mappings Spacetime sug: subj: Metaphor Mirror-writing Orthography & spelling Representation (Philosophy) Analytic mappings Spacetime keyword: culture metaphor orthography space time culture metaphor orthography space time ab: How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some cultures but on the left in others. Here we investigated whether experience reading can determine the direction and orientation of the mental timeline, independent of other cultural and linguistic factors. Dutch speakers performed space-time congruity tasks with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard, mirror-reversed, or rotated orthography. When participants judged temporal phrases written in standard orthography, their reaction times were consistent with a rightward-directed mental timeline, but after brief exposure to mirror-reversed orthography, their mental timelines were reversed. When standard orthography was rotated 90° clockwise (downward) or counterclockwise (upward), participants' mental timelines were rotated, accordingly. Reading can play a causal role in shaping people's implicit time representations. Exposure to a new orthography can change the direction and orientation of the mental timeline within minutes, even when the new space-time mapping directly contradicts the reader's usual mapping. To account for this representational flexibility, we propose the hierarchical mental metaphors theory, according to which culturally conditioned mappings between space and time are specific instances of a more general mapping, which is conditioned by the relationship between space and time in the physical world. Conceptualizations of time are culture specific at one level of analysis but may be universal at another. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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