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Abstract:
How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper
we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie
people’s more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed.
People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a long vacation, a short concert).
Do people also think about time using spatial representations, even when they are not using
language? Results of six psychophysical experiments revealed that people are unable to ignore
irrelevant spatial information when making judgments about duration, but not the converse.
This pattern, which is predicted by the asymmetry between space and time in linguistic metaphors,
was demonstrated here in tasks that do not involve any linguistic stimuli or responses.
These findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time
observed in language also exists in our more basic representations of distance and duration.
Results suggest that our mental representations of things we can never see or touch may be
built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.
