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Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

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Abstract

The notion of a mental time-line (i.e., past corresponds to left and future corresponds to right) supports the conceptual metaphor view assuming that abstract concepts like “time” are grounded in cognitively more accessible concepts like “space.” In five experiments, we further investigated the relationship between temporal and spatial representations and examined whether or not the spatial correspondents of time are unintentionally activated. We employed a priming paradigm, in which visual or auditory prime words (i.e., temporal adverbs such as yesterday, tomorrow) preceded a colored square. In all experiments, participants discriminated the color of this square by responding with the left or the right hand. Although the temporal reference of the priming adverb was task irrelevant in Experiment 1, visually presented primes facilitated responses to the square in correspondence with the direction of the mental time-line. This priming effect was absent in Experiments 2, 3, and 5, in which the primes were presented auditorily and the temporal reference of the words could be ignored. The effect, however, emerged when attention was oriented to the temporal content of the auditory prime words in Experiment 4. The results suggest that task demands differentially modulate the activation of the mental time-line within the visual and auditory modality and support a flexible association between conceptual codes.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (SFB 833, project B2), by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Subprograma de Acciones Integradas, DE-0040/2009) and Ministerio de Educación (Programa FPU). We thank Juan Lupiáñez, Steve Tipper, Marc Ouellet, and other anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Evolutionary Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstrasse 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Bettina Rolke, Mareike Schmid & Matthias Walker

  2. Leibniz Knowledge Media Research Center (KMRC), Tübingen, Germany

    Susana Ruiz Fernández

  3. Complutense University, Madrid, Spain

    Juan José Rahona López, Gonzalo Hervás & Carmelo Vázquez

  4. Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstrasse 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Martin Lachmair

Authors
  1. Bettina Rolke
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  2. Susana Ruiz Fernández
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  3. Mareike Schmid
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  4. Matthias Walker
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  5. Martin Lachmair
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  6. Juan José Rahona López
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  7. Gonzalo Hervás
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  8. Carmelo Vázquez
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Correspondence to Bettina Rolke.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 2.

Table 2 Prime words employed in the study
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Rolke, B., Fernández, S.R., Schmid, M. et al. Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode. Cogn Process 14, 231–244 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-013-0537-5

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