Can Mirror-Reading Reverse the Flow of Time?

Abstract. Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward. Can orthography influence implicit time representations independent of other cultural and linguistic factors? Native Dutch speakers performed a space-time congruity task with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard Dutch or mirror-reversed Dutch. Participants in the Standard Dutch condition were fastest to judge past-oriented phrases by pressing the left button and future-oriented phrases by pressing the right button. Participants in the Mirror-Reversed Dutch condition showed the opposite pattern of reaction times, consistent with results found previously in native Arabic and Hebrew speakers. These result...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SPATIALCOGNITION
• Authors: Daniel Casasanto, Roberto Bottini
• Keywords: Dutch Condition, Implicit Time Representations, Information Technology, SPATIALCOGNITION 2010, Standard Dutch