The Effect Of Space On Time In The Non-language Context

The representation of time is metaphorical in nature,which can't be represented without metaphor.The spatial metaphor is one important dimension of the representation construct of time metaphor,which is the focus in time metaphorical representation research recently.The research in human linguistics suggested that people mentioned time using spatial metaphor and the relations between time and space were asymmetric.Many theorist considered that the semantic representations were independent from underlying concept representation,in other words,the thoughts in our mind might be different when using language or not,and so the mode of how to affect,shape the non-language thought should be given attention.The relations between time and space were asymmetric in language metaphors,there is no idea whether the relations can be extended beyond language.When no language is used,how the time is considered,does it dependent on space either? whether the asymmetric relations between time and space also exist in the fundamental level of people's concept system?This research used three psychophysical experiments based on the protocol by Casasanto. In task1,we use the research based on the protocol by Casasanto to test Chinese people,in case that Chinese whether consider time dependent on space.We let the subjects looking the lines(horizontal) on the screen,then reproduction the durations or evaluating the displacements based on the indications.Results show Chinese can't leave the displacement to consider the durations,but not the converse.The purpose of task 2 is to test the stability of the relationships between space and time in the non-language context,discussing the infection of horizontal or vertical token of space on the time.We let the subjects looking the lines(vertical) on the screen,then reproduction the durations or evaluating the displacements based on the indications.Results show in vertical,people can't leave the displacement to consider the durations,but not the converse,and there is no difference in horizontal and vertical.We use task3 to test the change of the physical experiences how to effect the relationships between space and time in the non-language context.We let the subjects looking the startup-line (horizontal or vertical) on the screen,then looking the lines(horizontal or vertical) on the screen,and then reproduction the durations or evaluating the displacements based on the indications.Results show when the startup-line and target-line are consistent,people would get more infection which comes from the space when they reproduction the durations.In each task,participants viewed lines on a computer screen,and estimated either their duration or their spatial displacement.Durations and displacements were fully crossed,so there was no correlation between the spatial and temporal components of the stimuli.As such,one stimulus dimension served as a distractor for the other:an irrelevant piece of information that could potentially interfere with task performance.Patterns of cross-dimensional interference were analyzed to reveal relationships between spatial and temporal representations.Results of the experiments revealed that people are unable to ignore irrelevant spatial information when making judgments about duration,but not the converse.This pattern,which is predicted by the asymmetry between space and time in linguistic metaphors,was existed stablely in different groups and in different directions under the conditions.These findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in our more basic representations of distance and duration.Results suggest that our mental representations of things we can never see or touch may be built,in part,out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.