Department of Psychology, Stanford University.
Cogn Sci. 2005 Jul 8;29(4):655-64. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_17.
How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and motion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral type of motion called fictive motion (FM; as in The road runs along the coast) can influence thought about time. Our results suggest that FM uses the same structures evoked in understanding literal motion, and that these literal aspects of FM influence temporal reasoning.
我们如何理解时间和其他我们既无法触摸也无法看到的实体？一种可能性是，我们利用我们具体的、经验性的知识，包括我们对物理空间和运动的理解，来理解时间等抽象领域。为了研究这在认知中是多么普遍的一个方面，我们调查了对一种非字面意义上的运动的思考（称为虚构运动，如在“道路沿着海岸线延伸”中）是否会影响对时间的思考。我们的结果表明，虚构运动使用了在理解字面运动时引发的相同结构，并且这些虚构运动的字面方面会影响时间推理。
