The Vertical Spatial Metaphor Of Sequential Time And Its Influence On Body Perception

Time and space are interrelated.It is found that the psychological representation of time shares spatial characteristics,showing the effect of space-time joint encoding.Space-time joint encoding in language scenarios mainly refers to the space-time metaphor,which comes from the representation of time in terms of space in language scenarios,including horizontal(before and after,left and right)and vertical(up and down)space-time metaphor.Researchers believe that the manner of expressing time can be divided into two types: indicative time and sequential time.Indicative time refers to the "present" time as a reference point to distinguish the "past" and "future";Sequential time is mainly derived from the sequential relation of the object itself or the antecedent relation of the object in the space domain,with no relation to "ego" and "present".For the investigation of the representation of vertical space in time,the previous researches mainly take the indicative time expression as the experimental material.There is no research on the connection between sequential time expression and vertical space in Chinese culture,or the effect of such time representation on physical perception.Therefore,this study chooses to investigate whether Chinese subjects use vertical space to represent sequential time.If the results are positive,follow-up studies will explore whether sequential time expression affects physical perception,such as visual spatial attention and hand motion response.In the first phase,experiment 1 preliminarily explored the metaphorical bind between sequential time and vertical space,investigated the existence of the psychological reality of the time-related vertical space metaphor in Chinese.2(sequential time: "earlier","later")*2(vertical space: up and down)were used for the within-subjects design of the two-way ANOVA model.The research findings show the psychological reality in metaphorical bind between sequential time and vertical space,which is embodied in that the Chinese subjects judge and respond faster to the "earlier" presented above and to the "later" presented below.In the second stage,experiment 2 studied the influence of sequential time representation on hand motion response and examined the impact of sequential time representation on body perception.2(sequential time: "earlier","later")*2(key press action: upper key,lower key)were used for the within-subjects design of the two-way ANOVA model.The dependent variables were the response time and accuracy of the subjects to the key press judged by sequential time.The results prove that the representation of sequential time of Chinese subjects will affect their response to key pressing,and demonstrate time-space coherence effect of "down-earlier,up-later" in the hand motion of Chinese subjects.Specific performance is that the subject processing "earlier" time concept will press the down key faster,while others processing "later" time concept will press the up key faster.Furthermore,experiment 3 tested the effect of sequential time concept representation on visual spatial attention.2(sequential time: "earlier" and "later")*2(target position: up and down)were adopted for the within-subjects design of the two-way ANOVA model,the dependent variables were the response time and accuracy of the key press action to the judgment of target position.The results indicate that there was a space-time coherence effect of "up-earlier" and "down-later" on the eye level.Chinese subjects responded more quickly to the target stimulus above when processing the concept of "earlier" time,and responded faster when processing the concept of "later" time.Broadly speaking,the following conclusions can be drawn from this study :(1)the vertical space representation of sequential time concept present psychological reality;(2)the sequential time concept representation can carry out the hand press response and the shift of visual space attention,which correspond with the perceptual symbol theory.