Tuesday, October 21, 2014 | 12:30pm - 1:00pm | Room 237, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

Previous research indicates that people implicitly associate horizontal space with temporal concepts of past and future (Ouellet et al. 2010; Santiago et al. 2007; Tversky, Kugelmass, and Winter 1991). For instance, Santiago et al. (2007) proposed that people project the past to left space and the future to right space. Supporting this proposition, they found that judgments were facilitated when past words were responded to with the left hand, and future words with the right hand. Cross-cultural studies (e.g., Ouellet et al. 2010; Tversky et al. 1991) have further demonstrated that a writing system influences the temporal concepts and horizontal space association. Ouellet et al. (2010) found faster responses to past words with the left hand and future words with the right hand for Spanish participants, those who were exposed to a left-to-right writing system, but not for Hebrew participants, who were exposed to a right-to-left writing system. This finding indicates that people who are exposed to a left-to-right writing system tend to associate past with the left and future with the right (Ouellet et al. 2010; Tversky et al. 1991).