Thönes Sven, Stocker Kurt, Brugger Peter, Hecht Heiko
Ergonomics, Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Ardeystr. 67, 44139, Dortmund, Germany.
Experimental Psychology, Department of Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany.
Cogn Process. 2018 Aug;19(3):419-427. doi: 10.1007/s10339-018-0857-6. Epub 2018 Feb 20.
Recent evidence has shown that the mental representation of time is "embodied"-time is expressed via the hands, the eyes, and the whole body. These findings suggest the existence of a manually reflected mental time line running (in Western culture) horizontally from left (past) to right (future) and an ocularly reflected mental time line running from left/down (past) to right/up (future). We addressed the question whether mental time is also reflected interpersonally and investigated whether an avatar's face orientation (left vs. right) would facilitate a subject's temporal processing in relation to the horizontal mental time line. In combination with a left- or right-gazing avatar, we presented a temporal auditory word ("gestern"-yesterday or "morgen"-tomorrow), and our subjects had to manually categorize the word as being either past- or future-related (classic left/right key-press paradigm). The stimulus-response (SR) mapping was either compatible (past word-left hand, future word-right hand) or incompatible (future word-left hand, past word-right hand). Responses were significantly faster in blocks with compatible versus incompatible mapping. Thus, our results provide clear evidence for manually reflected mental time running from left to right, even for temporal auditory words that are free of potential visual (reading direction) confounds. The presented interpersonal cues (avatar head orientation) facilitated the activation of the horizontal mental time line in blocks with incompatible SR-mapping but not in blocks with compatible (standard) mapping. We conclude that interpersonal cues exert weak effects on the spatial representation of mental time and can help to adapt context-specific mappings of temporal concepts.
最近的证据表明，时间的心理表征是“具身化的”——时间通过手、眼睛和整个身体来表达。这些发现表明，（在西方文化中）存在一条从左（过去）到右（未来）水平运行的手动反映的心理时间线，以及一条从左/下（过去）到右/上（未来）运行的视觉反映的心理时间线。我们探讨了心理时间是否也在人际间得到反映这一问题，并研究了虚拟化身的面部朝向（左与右）是否会促进受试者相对于水平心理时间线的时间处理。我们将一个向左或向右注视的虚拟化身与一个表示时间的听觉单词（“gestern”——昨天或“morgen”——明天）相结合呈现给受试者，受试者必须手动将该单词归类为与过去或未来相关（经典的左右按键范式）。刺激-反应（SR）映射要么是一致的（过去的单词用左手，未来的单词用右手），要么是不一致的（未来的单词用左手，过去的单词用右手）。在映射一致的组中，反应明显比映射不一致的组更快。因此，我们的结果为从左到右运行的手动反映的心理时间提供了明确证据，即使对于没有潜在视觉（阅读方向）混淆的表示时间的听觉单词也是如此。所呈现的人际线索（虚拟化身头部朝向）在SR映射不一致的组中促进了水平心理时间线的激活，但在映射一致（标准）的组中没有。我们得出结论，人际线索对心理时间的空间表征影响较弱，并且可以帮助适应时间概念的特定情境映射。
