Li Heng, Cao Yu
School of Linguistic Sciences and Arts, Jiangsu Normal University.
Department of Humanities, Northumbria University.
Cogn Sci. 2018 Apr;42(3):1041-1056. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12579. Epub 2018 Jan 9.
People implicitly associate the "past" and "future" with "front" and "back" in their minds according to their cultural attitudes toward time. As the temporal focus hypothesis (TFH) proposes, future-oriented people tend to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping, whereas past-oriented people tend to think about time according to the past-in-front mapping (de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache, & Casasanto, 2014). Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that culture exerts an important influence on people's implicit spatializations of time, we focus specifically on religion, a prominent layer of culture, as potential additional influence on space-time mappings. In Experiment 1 and 2, we observed a difference between the two religious groups, with Buddhists being more past-focused and more frequently conceptualizing the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them, and Taoists more future-focused and exhibiting the opposite space-time mapping. In Experiment 3, we administered a religion prime, in which Buddhists were randomly assigned to visualize the picture of the Buddhas of the Past (Buddha Dipamkara) or the Future (Buddha Maitreya). Results showed that the pictorial icon of Dipamkara increased participants' tendency to conceptualize the past as in front of them. In contrast, the pictorial icon of Maitreya caused a dramatic increase in the rate of future-in-front responses. In Experiment 4, the causal effect of religion on implicit space-time mappings was replicated in atheists. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence for the hypothesized causal role of religion for temporal focus in determining space-time mappings.
根据人们对时间的文化态度，他们在脑海中会将“过去”和“未来”与“前”和“后”进行隐含的关联。正如时间焦点假说（TFH）所提出的，面向未来的人倾向于按照未来在前的映射来思考时间，而面向过去的人倾向于按照过去在前的映射来思考时间（德拉富恩特、圣地亚哥、罗曼、杜米特拉切和卡萨桑托，2014）。虽然先前的研究已经表明文化对人们时间的隐含空间化有重要影响，但我们特别关注宗教这一突出的文化层面，认为它可能对时空映射有额外的影响。在实验1和实验2中，我们观察到两个宗教群体之间的差异，佛教徒更关注过去，更频繁地将过去概念化为在他们前方，将未来概念化为在他们后方，而道教徒更关注未来，并表现出相反的时空映射。在实验3中，我们进行了一次宗教启动，其中佛教徒被随机分配去想象过去佛（燃灯佛）或未来佛（弥勒佛）的画像。结果表明，燃灯佛的画像增加了参与者将过去概念化为在他们前方的倾向。相反，弥勒佛的画像导致未来在前反应的比例急剧增加。在实验4中，宗教对隐含时空映射的因果效应在无神论者中得到了重复验证。综上所述，这些发现为宗教在确定时空映射中对时间焦点的假设因果作用提供了一致的证据。
