Pitch Affects Estimates of Space but not Vice Versa

Pitch Affects Estimates of Space but not Vice Versa Alexander Kranjec (kranjeca@duq.edu) Psychology Department, Duquesne University Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA Matthew Lehet (mil@andrew.cmu.edu) Psychology Department, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA Anjan Chatterjee (anjan@mail.med.upenn.edu) Neurology Department and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA Abstract think about. It is argued that this is necessary because we can directly see and touch things “in space” in a way that we cannot “in time”. This suggests that thinking about time in terms of space runs cognitively deep, and reflects a mental organization more fundamental than that observed at the relatively superficial level of words. The idea that we think about relatively abstract domains (like time) in terms of more concrete domains (like space) but not vice versa can be traced to conceptual metaphor theory. Experiments using verbal and/or visual stimuli suggest a deep ontological basis for space-time asymmetries. Yet vision makes a privileged contribution to spatial processing raising questions about modality. Recently, we found that in sound, time and space are mutually contagious, with a larger effect of time on space. Here we examine the mutual effects of space, time, and pitch, a uniquely auditory attribute. If space is more abstract than time in sound, space should be more easily contaminated by pitch, while being less effective in contaminating it. While time and pitch were shown to be mutually contagious, pitch affected estimates of space but not vice versa. Results overall suggest that in sound, time is not fundamentally more abstract than space. Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008) originally provided experimental evidence for this theoretical organizational principle. They were interested in whether the asymmetry of space-time metaphors in language predicted a similar asymmetry in visual perception. Specifically, they found that the remembered size of a line in space concordantly modulated recall for its duration, but not vice versa. That is, (spatially) longer lines were remembered as being presented for longer times, but lines of greater durations were not remembered as having greater spatial extent. The results were consistent with the idea that asymmetrical patterns of space-time mappings in language are preserved further down at the level of perception. However, because this study relied on visual tasks, it was still not clear if observed behavioral asymmetries between time and space reflect (1) general ontological (or even metaphysical) relations dependent on each domain’s relative level of “abstractness” or (2) a less general, modality-specific contribution of visual representations in humans. Keywords: space and time; language and thought; metaphor; embodiment Introduction Time is talked about in spatial terms much more frequently than space is talked about in terms of time. In many ways time must be talked about using the language of space, whereas the opposite is not true. Such asymmetrical linguistic patterns have been interpreted to suggest an asymmetry at a deeper level of conceptual organization. According to conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) we think about relatively abstract domains (like time) in terms of more concrete domains (like space). It is maintained that this organizational principle serves the functional role of making more abstract concepts easier to talk about and There are intuitive reasons to think that time−space asymmetries observed in vision might actually be reversed in sound, as time, more than space, seems to be an intimate part of our auditory experience. For example, whereas spatial relations and visual objects tend to be persistent, sound, like time, is relatively transient (Galton, 2011). Temporal information is more critical and/or salient in common forms of experience grounded in sound perception (e.g., music and speech) and sound localization