The Spatial Representation Of Acoustic Temporal Duration Information And Its Cognitive Mechanism

Time is different from other stimuli, and temporal awareness differs from other sensory awareness. Many problems about time have continually attracted and baffled modern philosophers and psychologists. One of the basic questions is how is time processed by humans which couldn’t be seen, touched, or weighed. How does time exist in our brain? Or how is time represented in mind?The present study mainly focused on the spatial representation of temporal information. Time was something abstract whose representation needed other concrete substances, and one of the most important was space. Recently, the phenomenon of spatial representation of time was referred to as "Mental Time Line", which implied, based on equal accuracy, participants’reaction was more quick with his/her right hand to the "future"(or "later") than to the "past"(or "earlier"), and more quick with his/her left hand to the "past"(or "earlier") than to the "future"(or "later") in RT experiments.When referred to its mechanism, researchers mainly focused on arguments between attention and response codes at present, both of which were supported by different studies. Besides, there were also studies confirming that both of them were involved in the process.There were mainly three theories accounting for origins of this phenomenon: metaphor theory, A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM), and embodied cognition theory. Metaphor theory mainly emphasized the role of humans’using language and metaphor in representation of abstract notions; ATOM focused on the common point-magnitude of numbers, space and time; Embodied cognition theory argued that concrete body and mental experience played a basic role in the foundation of abstract conceptions.From the temporal duration perspective, two goals was set in present study, one was to explore whether there was a compatibility effect between time duration and space:either left and right or up and down, this might add some evidences to embodied cognition theory; the other was to reveal its possible cognitive mechanism. Here were three experiments included. In Expl, two sounds (a shorter and a longer one), used as experiment materials, was respectively reacted by participants with left-right distributed keys. There was no difference between Expl and Exp3, but that response keys was set as up and down distributed. Exp2combined stoop paradigm and the task of remembering and judging two kinds of sounds to explore the mechanism. In stroop paradigm, participants were directed to response to the direction of an arrow (left or right), which might be consistent or conflict with its location (left or right).Results revealed that:(1) The compatibility effect between duration of sounds and left-right space existed. Compared to the longer sound, participants responded more quickly with his left hand; compared to the shorter sound, participants responded more quickly with his right hand.(2) There was no compatibility effect duration of sounds and up-down space. There were no significant differences on reaction time when react to different sounds with the up and down keys. The above results might be better explained by embodied theory.(3) The mechanism of compatibility effect might only be response codes. Interaction effect of reaction time existed only between time intervals and directions of arrow, whereas not between time intervals and locations of arrow.