Why do we think of the future as being in front of us? New clues from study of people born blind

By Alex Fradera Where is the future? The tendency in our culture – and most, but not all, others – is to compare the body’s movement through space with its passage through time: ahead are the things we are on our way to encounter. We intuit that the past is linked to the space behind and the future to that in front. But research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General has found that some Western people buck this tendency: those born blind. A team led by Luca Rinaldi of the University of Pavia recruited 17 normally sighted local participants and 17 participants of similar age who had early onset or congenital blindness and were unable to recollect any visual memories from their past. All participants were asked to sit at a desk, wear headphones and, if sighted, to wear a blindfold. Their task was to categorise the Italian words they heard over the headphones as quickly as possible as either a future or past word. The words were either adverbs like Prima (before) and Imminente (imminent) or verbs like Scrisse / Scriverà  (he wrote / he will write). To categorise, participants had to move their hand forward to press a more distant key, or backward to press a key nearer their body. In one block of the experiment, participants were asked to use the forward response for future words and back for past ones, and in another the reverse mapping was required. Consistent with previous research, the sighted participants responded more quickly in the congruent bloc...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Perception Time Source Type: blogs