The human evolution over time is represented as a travel from the left to the right.
Our day to day conversations provide instances that seem to imply the association of the past to our 'behind' and the future to the 'front'. Ex. "Back in the 60's, things were much simple." "I'm looking forward to meet you." Also, the notion of time is projected as a travel(movement) from one location (past), to another (future). This is only one among many examples where abstract concepts are built on the foundations of basic image schemas, acquired through patterns of bodily interactions with the world. In the current context, the concept of time is seen to be understood over a spatial domain, where time is seen to flow from behind to forward.
Such linguistic analysis is limited to the use of metaphors. Empirical data from Torralbo, Santiago, & Lupianez (2006, exp. 1), based on the 'comfort' of the participants with the situation, when the words suggesting tense (past or future) were overlapped with the spatial cues. Participants were asked to judge if a word appearing to the front or the back of a side-looking head silhouette referred to the past or to the future. They were faster to respond when the situation is forward-back congruent, i.e., pastwords were presented to the back of the head and future words were presented to the front.
Similar studies, (Santiago, Lupianez, Perez, & Funes (2007)) found another such association when past words were associated with the left side and the future with the right. The following figure, may serve a good example to the same.
The human evolution over time is represented as a travel from the left to the right.
The aim of this project is to investigate into such associations based on experiments that test the interference of the spatial cues with the temporal information, thus, verifying the existence of such representations.
[1] Mario Bonato, Marco Zorzi, Carlo Umilta , 2012. When time is space: Evidence for a mental time line. Elsevier: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36 (2012), 2257-2273. [2] Torralbo, A., Santiago, J., Lupianez, J., 2006. Flexible conceptual projection of time onto spatial frames of reference. Cognitive Sciences 30, 745-757. [3] Santiago, J., Lupianez, J., Perez, E., Funes, M.J., 2007. Time, also flies from left to right. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14, 512-516. [4] Ouellet, M., Santiago, J., Funes, M.J., Lupianez, J., 2010a. Thinking about the future moves attention to the right. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 36, 17-24.