Abstract
A growing body of evidence has suggested that time, from early to late, or from past to future, was represented in a spatially oriented mental time line. However, little is known about its characteristics. The present study provided the first empirical evidence to explore the symmetry of spatial representations of past and future in the mental time line. Specifically, we compared the Spatial-Temporal Association Response Codes (STARC) effects and distance effects of past and future in four experiments. Results showed that for near past and near future, STARC effects were similar (Experiment 1). For distant past, the STARC effect was significant, but not for distant future (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the distance effect in the past was significantly stronger than in the future (Experiments 3, 4). These findings supported the idea that time points are not evenly distributed in mental time line. Spatial representations of the past and the future are asymmetric, and the spatial representation of past seems stronger than future. The logarithmic pattern of internal spatial representation of past or future is also discussed.
Highlights
Human beings often represent abstract concepts in concrete visual-spatial images
EXPERIMENT 3 The results of Experiments 1, 2 showed that spatial representations of past and future in the mental time line were symmetric in near space, but asymmetric in distant space
The present study provided the first empirical evidence for a fundamental characteristic of the mental time line: Are the spatial representations of past and future symmetric in the mental time line?
Summary
Human beings often represent abstract concepts in concrete visual-spatial images. The spatial representation of number is a typical instance. It was suggested that numbers are represented in a continuous mental number line based on the extensive research on the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect (Dehaene et al, 1993; Fischer et al, 2003; Schwarz and Keus, 2004; Hubbard et al, 2005; Nuerk et al, 2005a,b). Researchers recently observed a SNARC like effect with time, which was labeled as the Spatial-Temporal Association of Response Codes (STARC) effect (Ishihara et al, 2008; Vallesi et al, 2008). Time is represented in a continuous spatial line with a left-to-right orientation, where time flows from early to late, or from past to future (Bonato et al, 2012)
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