Research Article
Space-Time Compatibility Effects
in the Auditory Modality
Feng Kong and Xuqun You
Department of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, P. R. China
Abstract. Previous research suggests that past and future temporal concepts are spatially represented from left to right along a mental line. And
these concepts can both prime motor responses to left or right space and direct visual spatial attention. The present study aimed at investigating
the nature of this space-time conceptual metaphor in different auditory tasks. In the first experiment, subjects categorized time-related words (past
or future) that were presented binaurally. In the second experiment, subjects detected left-ear or right-ear targets following time-related words.
The similar space-time compatibility effects were found in these two experiments. Our results demonstrate that the activation of temporal
concepts can both prime motor responses to left or right space and influence the orientation of auditory spatial attention, suggesting that the
modality of the stimulus input is unimportant for the left-right mapping of time. These results are explained by the ‘‘intermediate coding’’
account.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, time, attentional orienting, representation, auditory modality
In order to facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts
(e.g., number, happiness, time), people need to ground them
onto more concrete experiences, such as space. This is often
called Conceptual Metaphor, which refers to the use of a
source domain to facilitate understanding a target domain
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). As an abstract concept,
time is associated with more concrete concept (e.g., space),
which has been found in everyday expressions of time in
almost all languages (e.g., Haspelmath, 1997; Radden,
2004). For example, in many languages, up/down spatial
terms are used to talk about time, for example, ‘‘in the
weeks coming up’’ in English, ‘‘xia`geyue`’’ (next month)
in Chinese (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Chen, 2007; Liu &
Zhang, 2009; Radden, 2004).
Radden (2004) found no evidence for using the left-right
axis in lexical items, syntactic constructions, or other kind of
conventional linguistic markers of time. However, recent
work has demonstrated that the representation of time is asso-
ciated with the representation of space on a left-right axis.
For example, Santiago, Lupia´n˜ez, Pe´rez, and Funes (2007)
found that participants’ responses were facilitated when past
words were presented on the left visual field or responded to
with the left hand when past and future words had to be cat-
egorized on temporal meaning. The opposite was true for
future words. Similar stimulus-response compatibility effects
have also been observed in other studies. When participants
had to discriminate whether an actor became popu lar before
or after they were born (e.g., Marilyn Monroe vs. Kate
Winslet), manual responses were again shorter when the
stimulus-response mapping was compatible with a left-to-
right representation of time (Weger & Pratt, 2008). Recently,
Santiago, Roma´n,Ouellet,Rodrı´guez, and Pe´rez-Azor
(2010) extended this compatibility effect to experienced
event sequences presented by means of video clips or
photograph sequences. Order judgments of two events were
shorter for the left hand to respond ‘‘before’’ and the right
hand to respond ‘‘after’’ than with the opposite pattern.
As we can see, almost all the prior studies investigated
the space-time compatibility effects in the visual modality.
Past studies suggest directional reading habits have an impor-
tant influence on the compatibility effects (e.g., Fuhrman &
Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet, Santiago, Israeli, & Gabay,
2010). For example, when participants made rapid temporal
order judgments about pairs of pictures depicting temporal
sequences of natural events, English speakers (who read left
to right) responded faster to earlier events with the left hand,
while Hebrew speakers (who read right to left) responded
faster to earlier events with the right hand (Fuhrman &
Boroditsky, 2010). It is perhaps possible that the use of the
visual modality activates the left-right representation of time.
In the case of those studies employing visual words, the
directional action of reading might constitute an additional
source of these spatial biases.
The space-time compatibility effects could be accounted
for in two different ways. It could be that temporal meanings
direct spatial attention, or alternatively, they prime motor
responses to left or right space (or both), resulting in the
automatic activation of congruent reactions. In order to pro-
vide a clearer understanding of the representation of time in
horizontal space, we decided to examine these two alterna-
tive underlying mechanisms in two different auditory tasks.
Weger and Pratt (2008) adopted a cuing paradi gm (Posner ,
1980; Posner & Cohen, 1984) to discriminate between spatial
attention orienting and manual response codes activation. Par-
ticipants performed a spa tial discrimination task or a detection
task in which a future or past word as a temporal cue was pre-
sented to the center of the screen and then an unpredictable tar-
get was presented to the left or right. The y obtaine d a
2011 Hogrefe Publishing Experimental Psychology 2011
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000129