The Role of Cultural Artifacts in the Interpretation of Metaphorical Expressions About Time

Abstract

Across cultures, people employ space to construct representations of time. English exhibits two deictic space–time metaphors: the “moving ego” metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the “moving time” metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward towards the ego. Earlier research investigating the psychological reality of these metaphors has shown that engaging in certain types of spatial-motion thinking may influence how people reason about events in time. More recently, research has shown that people’s interactions with cultural artifacts may also influence their representations of time. Extending research on space–time mappings in new directions, three experiments investigated the role of cultural artifacts, namely calendars and clocks, in the interpretation of metaphorical expressions about time. Taken together, the results provide initial evidence that, in their interpretation of ambiguous metaphorical expressions about time, people automatically access and use spatial representations of absolute time, whereby moving forward in space corresponds with moving later in time. Moreover, asking participants to use a reverse space–time mapping causes interference, which is reflected through their temporal reasoning.

Notes

¹ Cultural artifacts (or in other parlance, cultural technologies, cognitive artifacts, or material artifacts), can be defined as “artifacts that support symbolic and conceptual processes in abstract conceptual domains” (da Silva Sinha, Sinha, Sampaio, & Zinken, 2012, p. 32; cf. Evans, 2013; Núñez & Cooperrider, 2013; Tversky, 2011; Williams, 2004).

² Abstract motion occurs in processes that involve mentally moving from symbol to symbol in an ordinal sequence (see Langacker, 1986, 1987).

³ Examples included: A book will be re-edited so that page 10 will move forward 5 pages (spatial); Normally an alarm clock is set for 9 a.m. but the alarm has been moved forward 10 minutes (clock); The winter Olympics normally take place in December but the committee has moved it forward one month (calendar). The responses to each question were coded as either ego-moving or time-moving in their representation.

⁴ Concordantly, other lines of research have similarly demonstrated that people tend to be consistent in their representations of time, such that people who imagine moving forward a meeting scheduled for Wednesday by two days to Monday (as opposed to Friday) are also more likely to imagine moving forward a meeting scheduled for noon by two hours to 10 a.m. (as opposed to 2 p.m.; Núñez, Motz, & Teuscher, 2006; cf. Duffy, Feist, & McCarthy, in press).

⁵ A spatial schema can be considered as a “condensed redescription of perceptual experience for the purpose of mapping spatial structure onto conceptual structure” (Oakley, 2010, p. 215; cf. Johnson, 1987).

⁶ Metalinguistic awareness involves the ability to think explicitly about aspects of language and solve linguistic problems, such as the detection of ambiguity and grammaticality (Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1990; Galambos & Hakuta, 1988). This requires an awareness of language as a system, as well as an ability to access and manipulate knowledge about the system (Bialystok & Ryan, 1985).

⁷ Matthew’s Day Off is Honda’s 2012 game-day Super Bowl commercial for the Honda CRV, in which actor Matthew Broderick parodies his role in the popular film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5l1_s4urU).

⁸ Indeed, findings from behavioral studies have shown that the left-to-right representation of the mental line in Western cultures generalizes to the mental representation of ordinal sequences more broadly, such as the arrangement of numbers, letters, days, and months. When people are thinking about ordinal sequences, they move along the mental line, suggesting a strong coupling between external physical space and internal mental space (e.g., Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993; Gevers, Reynvoet, & Fias, 2003).

⁹ Notably, the proportion of Monday and Friday responses without the distracter task is in line with the responses reported in Experiment 1, which included a distracter task.

¹⁰ Notably, other lines of research investigating the ways in which people spatially represent the months of the year show that time–space synesthetes are more likely to depict calendars using cyclical representations, whereas, consistent with Kessell’s (2008) findings, non-synesthetes are more likely to use linear rows or rectangular arrangements (Brang et al., 2010).

¹¹ The dearth of research on cyclical representations of time might be attributed to the fact that cyclical representations of time are comparatively less diverse than linear representations of time. To illustrate, consider the way in which the hands on an analogue clock rotate around the dial in a clockwise direction. The explanation for this is quite simple: the first mechanical clocks were built to imitate the path of a sundial shadow where, in the northern hemisphere, the shadow on the sundial rotates from west to north to east, i.e., clockwise (Sorensen, 2011); henceforth, the clockwise rotation became quasi-standardized across the globe.

¹² It should be noted that preliminary cross-linguistic research investigating the Wednesday’s meeting question indicates that when translated into some languages (e.g., Dutch, Danish), the question remains ambiguous, while in other languages (e.g., German, Mandarin), the ambiguity is not apparent (Bender et al., 2010; Elvevåg et al., 2011; Lai & Boroditsky, 2013; see also Duffy & Feist, 2014); thus, whether or not multiple competing interpretations are available in the language being examined is a factor that should be taken into consideration in further cross-linguistic research in this area.

¹³ Examples include Amondawa (Sinha et al., 2011), Aymara (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), Mian (Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012), Pormpuraaw (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010), Tzeltal (Brown, 2012), Yélî Dnye (Levinson & Majid, 2013), Yucatec Mayas (Le Guen & Balam, 2012), and Yupno (Núñez et al., 2012).

¹⁴ I thank Michele Feist for raising this point.

¹⁵ It should be noted that recent research has sought to distinguish between two fundamentally different representations of deictic time: one with an “internal” perspective, where the deictic center (the ego) correlates with the present and metaphorically signifies the experience of now and a second with an “external” perspective, where the deictic center is displaced to an external vantage point, which is perpendicular to the axis on which time is represented (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Núñez & Cooperrider, 2013). Moreover, recent research on temporal gestures indicates that, in their conceptualisation of external deictic time, people adopt a “moving attention” perspective (as opposed to a “moving ego” or “moving time” perspective), which is grounded in patterns of interaction with cultural artifacts (as opposed to patterns of interaction with the natural environment; Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012).