Time (also) flies from left to right... if it is needed!

Time (also) flies from left to right. if it is needed! Andrea Flumini (andrea.flumini2@unibo.it) Department of Psychology, University of Bologna Viale Berti Pichat 5, 40100 Bologna, Italy Julio Santiago (santiago@ugr.es) Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada Campus de Cartuja, 18071 Granada, Spain Abstract The TIME IS SPACE metaphor consists in the use of a spatial mental time line (either left-right or front-back) to represent time. One of the issues still to be resolved is whether these space-time mappings can be automatically activated independently from the goals of the task. Prior attempts to settle this issue have failed to match adequately the temporally relevant and irrelevant tasks. In the present study we presented Spanish verbs and nonverbs conjugated in past and future forms in both a time judgment and a lexical decision task. Results showed that the left-right space-time mapping is only active when the task requires temporal discrimination, speaking against an automatic activation of the mental time line. Keywords: time; space; mental time line; automaticity; flexibility; embodied cognition; conceptual metaphor. Introduction As a response to the symbol grounding problem (Harnad, 1990), the Embodied and Grounded Cognition view (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Gibbs, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1987) suggests that abstract concepts need to be grounded on concrete domains (i.e., those more directly based on sensory-motor experiences) in order to gain meaning. Under this view, language processing elicits an embodied simulation which is carried on by the very same neural systems used by perception, emotion and action (Barsalou, 2008; Gallese, 2008; Glenberg & Gallese, 2011; Glenberg et al, 2008). When abstract concepts are referred to, such simulation follows the guide of stored mappings between abstract and concrete concepts. One line of support for this idea comes from empirical studies on the abstract domain of TIME, which seems to be grounded on the concrete domain of SPACE. Response time studies have reported interactions between the processing of the temporal reference of words and sentences and a variety of response mappings: lateralized key presses, forward-backward manual movements, vocal responses (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Ouellet et al, 2010b; Santiago et al, 2007; Sell & Kaschack, 2011; Torralbo et al, 2006; Ulrich & Maienborn, 2010; Ulrich et al, 2012). Space-time congruency effects are part of a wide family of studies that manipulate concrete and abstract dimensions in tasks that require elaborating and responding to aspects of the abstract dimension. In this context, modulations due to task-irrelevant concrete dimensions are often found on the processing of the abstract, task-relevant dimension. The resulting metaphoric congruency effect has been interpreted as the index of the use of underlying concrete representations to organize the abstract dimension, as i.e. in the SNARC effect (Dehaene et al, 1993). Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which has a longstanding support from linguistics and psychological studies (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Clark, 1973; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Nunez & Sweetser, 2006; Talmy, 2000), pointed out that our vocabulary about abstract concepts has concrete roots. But one of the most interesting consequences of the empirical findings on conceptual metaphors has been the discovery of the existence of metaphoric mappings not explicitly attested in language (for a review, see Santiago et al 2011). In the last years, the most studied example has been one TIME IS SPACE metaphor, which maps temporal reference onto the left-right horizontal spatial axis. In contrast to the mapping of time onto the front- back axis, which is explicitly attested in many languages (e.g., Sell & Kaschack, 2011; Torralbo et al, 2006; Ulrich et al, 2012), in his review of cross-linguistic space-time metaphors Radden (2004) observed a total lack of linguistic conventions directly referring in speech to a horizontal left-right time dimension. However, we are all used to conventional associations of time as flowing from left to right (or right to left) along a horizontal axis in written language, graphs, and in many types of graphic devices (e.g., comic strips, calendars, etc.). The interpretation of conceptual congruency effects as indexes of stable semantic memory mappings has been clearly contradicted by recent experimental results. There is evidence in the literature of different degrees of flexibility/automaticity depending on the abstract dimension studied, the task and materials used, the kind of mappings which are evaluated (Santiago et al, 2011). Nowadays, there seems to be a well-motivated support to the idea that conceptual congruency effects could be of a very contextual nature (e.g., Torralbo et al, 2006; Santiago et al, 2008; Santiago et al, 2012; Lakens et al, 2012). One of the strongest cases of automatic activation has been observed for the mapping of affective evaluation to front-back responses: participants are faster in responding to positive and negative items by pulling and pushing a lever, respectively (e.g., Chen & Bargh, 1999). This occurs not only when the decision is based on the valence of the stimuli, but also when performing a lexical decision task (Wentura et al, 2000) and even a stimulus detection task (Chen & Bargh, 1999), which minimize the task- relevance of the evaluative dimension. In contrast, space-