The Dissociated Effect Of Virtual Sensorimotor Experience On Mental Time Lines

Previous research revealed that time can be represented in three dimensions,which are called mental time lines.And different dimensions of mental time lines may have different origination,the horizontal one originate from our sensorimotor experience,which is associate with our writing and reading habbits,and the other two from metaphor.But little is known about the mechanism of mental time line.There is a basic theoretical argument about this problem,does the activation of mental time line have a functional link to its origination?Do mental time lines of different origination have divergent mechanisms?Three experiments were conducted to examine this problem.Experiment 1,2,and 3 constructed three different virtual reality scenes by VR facilities,in which participants would feel like moving horizontally,sagittally,and vertically.And in each scene,there are two different moving directions,either leftward or rightward,forward or backward,upward or downward.While participants were totally immersed in one of those scenes,they were asked to classify the words as past-related or future-related by pushing the joystick into different directions.In experiment 1,the response time in the rightward scene(congruent condition)shows a significant STARC effect while the RT in leftward scene(incongruent condition)does not.Experiment 2 only shows a main effect of congruency,but not a similar effect like Exp.1.This result indicates that sensorimotor experience does affect the horizontal mental time line,but doesn't influence the sagittal one.Experiment 3 got an unexpected result,the STARC effect disappeared(compared with control condition),which may reveal the instability of the vertical mental time line which is disrupted by the virtual sensorimotor experience.In general,different dimensions of mental time lines do not share a common mechanism,which has an intimate relationship with its origination.Especially,the representation of horizontal mental time line is functionally linked to those low-level sensorimotor processes,while the sagittal one may emerge at a higher cognitive level.But in vertical,the mental time line wasn't activated in our experiment,which may results from participants' fearness to the up-down moving.This dissociated effect of sensorimotor on mental time line we found above may have a profounding theoretical significance for us to understand the mechanism of mental time line,which largely clarify the problem of mechanism and origination debate of abstract concept,and also provide a new way to look into the divergent mechanisms of embodied cognition.