Dept. de Psicologia Experimental y Fisiologia del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, 18071-Granada, Spain.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2010 Feb;36(1):17-24. doi: 10.1037/a0017176.
Previous studies have shown that past and future temporal concepts are spatially represented (past being located to the left and future to the right in a mental time line). This study aims at further investigating the nature of this space-time conceptual metaphor, by testing whether the temporal reference of words orient spatial attention or rather prime a congruent left/right response. A modified version of the spatial cuing paradigm was used in which a word's temporal reference must be kept in working memory whilst participants carry out a spatial localization (Experiment 1) or a direction discrimination, spatial Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that the mere activation of the past or future concepts both oriented attention and primed motor responses to left or right space, respectively, and these effects were independent. Moreover, in spite of the fact that such time-reference cues were nonpredictive, the use of a short and a long stimulus onset asynchrony in Experiment 3 showed that these cues modulated spatial attention as typical central cues like arrows do, suggesting a common mechanism for these two types of cuing.
先前的研究表明，过去和未来的时间概念在空间上是有表示的（在心理时间线上，过去位于左侧，未来位于右侧）。本研究旨在通过测试单词的时间参照是否定向空间注意，或者是否启动了一致的左/右反应，进一步探究这种时空概念隐喻的本质。在使用空间提示范式的修改版中，参与者在执行空间定位（实验 1）或方向辨别、空间斯特鲁普任务（实验 2）时，必须在工作记忆中保留单词的时间参照。结果表明，过去或未来概念的单纯激活都分别定向了注意，并启动了对左或右空间的运动反应，这些效应是独立的。此外，尽管这些时间参照提示是非预测性的，但在实验 3 中使用短和长的刺激起始时间间隔表明，这些提示像箭头等典型的中央提示一样调节空间注意，这表明这两种类型的提示具有共同的机制。
