THE PAST AND FUTURE ARE IN YOUR HANDS: HOW GESTURES AFFECT OUR UNDERSTANDING OF TEMPORAL CONCEPTS

Abstract

Spatial metaphors are commonly used by individuals to represent and reason about time in daily conversations. In English, such spatial metaphors are arranged primarily along the sagittal axis. These metaphors are often paired with temporal gestures that reveal the possible axes along which our internal conceptualisation of time may be aligned against. The present study attempts to use temporal gestures as primes to investigate how individuals conceptualize time by tapping their temporal concepts directly. Participants made temporal classifications of words after watching a gestural prime. Results revealed effects of congruency along the sagittal axis, but not the lateral axis, as was commonly found in previous studies. This suggests that individuals primarily represent time most strongly along the sagittal axis when not constrained by a particular response format. Implications for models of how individuals represent time as well as methods of investigating how time is represented in the mind are discussed.