The future is in front, to the right, or below: Development of spatial representations of time in three dimensions

Abstract

Across cultures, people frequently communicate about time in terms of space. English speakers in the United States, for example, might "look forward" to the future or gesture toward the left when talking about the past. As shown by these examples, different dimensions of space are used to represent different temporal concepts. Here, we explored how cultural factors and individual differences shape the development of two types of spatiotemporal representations in 6- to 15-year-old children: the horizontal/vertical mental timeline (in which past and future events are placed on a horizontal or vertical line that is external to the body) and the sagittal mental timeline (in which events are placed on a line that runs through the front-back axis of the body). We tested children in India because the prevalence of both horizontal and vertical calendars there provided a unique opportunity to investigate how calendar orientation and writing direction might each influence the development of the horizontal/vertical mental timeline. Our results suggest that the horizontal/vertical mental timeline and the sagittal mental timeline are constructed in parallel throughout childhood and become increasingly aligned with culturally-conventional orientations. Additionally, we show that experience with calendars may influence the orientation of children's horizontal/vertical mental timelines, and that individual differences in children's attitudes toward the past and future may influence the orientation of their sagittal mental timelines. Taken together, our results demonstrate that children are sensitive to both cultural and personal factors when building mental models of time.

Keywords: Cognitive development; Mental metaphor; Space; Spatial cognition; Temporal cognition; Time.

Figure 1.

Example calendars drawn by our participants illustrating (A) a horizontal orientation and (B) a vertical orientation.

Figure 2.

Example of a temporal diagram task stimulus with the face oriented upwards. Participants were given stickers corresponding to past and future events to put in the empty boxes.

Figure 3.

Proportion of timeline arrangements in each grade by line type.

Figure 4.

Proportion of participants in each grade who created conventional (left-to-right or top-to-bottom) lines in the timeline task.

Figure 5.

Proportion of children in each grade classified into each mapping direction on temporal diagram production trials.

Figure 6.

Proportion of children in each grade who interpreted the temporal diagrams by each mapping direction.