Experimental Study On The Verticalspatial Metaphor Of Quantity—“More Is Up, Less Is Down”

Metaphor is the objective existence of life, people often use metaphors to understand more abstract things. Now the study of metaphor has entered the multidisciplinary field, the roles of metaphor in human cognition are recognized. Lakoff and Johnson proposed Conceptual Metaphor Theory to explain the implementation process of the metaphor, and considers the mapping process of metaphor is unidirectional, the mapping is only from the more familiar and specific domain of concepts to the unfamiliar and abstract domain of concepts. Conceptual Blending Theory and Interaction Theory argue that metaphor can exist bidirectional mapping.The subject of this study is graduate students, and they are adults, using sentence-- words matching method and the unrelated task paradigm, examine the implementation of the vertical spatial metaphor of quantity “more is up, less is down” and the existence of the inverse mapping. In the first experiment, the subjects were asked to read the sentences which containing expression with Chinese semantic quantity more or less, then to react to the letters presenting above or below the screen. It was found, the subjects reacted quickly to the letters presented above the spatial location when reading the sentences which expression the quantity is more, and reacted quickly to the letters presented in the bottom of the spatial location when reading the sentences which expression the quantity is less. In the second experiment, the subjects were asked to read the sentences containing a spatial displacement(up or down), then judge the words expression of quantity(more or less) presented on the screen. Experimental results showed that the subjects reacted quickly to the words expression that quantity ia more when reading sentence moving up in space, and reacted quickly to the words expression that quantity is less when reading sentence moving down in space.The experimental results show that, the vertical spatial metaphor of quantity ——“More is up, Less is down” does exist in the individual cognition, at the same time the metaphor also has a reverse mapping.