Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego-and temporal-reference-point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi-universal cross-culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego-reference-point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. The Aymara language instead has a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO; linguistic and gestural data give strong confirmation of this unusual culture-specific cognitive pattern. Gestural data provide crucial information unavailable to purely linguistic analysis, suggesting that when investigating conceptual systems both forms of expression should be analyzed complementarily. Important issues in embodied cognition are raised: how fully shared are bodily grounded motivations for universal cognitive patterns, what makes a rare pattern emerge, and what are the cultural entailments of such patterns?

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Mathematics requires precise inferences about abstract objects inaccessible to perception. How is this possible? One proposal is that mathematical reasoning, while concerned with entirely abstract objects, nevertheless relies on neural resources specialized for interacting with the world-in other words, mathematics may be grounded in spatial or sensorimotor systems. Mental arithmetic, for instance, could involve shifts in spatial attention along a mental "number-line", the product of cultural artefacts and practices that systematically spatialize number and arithmetic. Here, we investigate this hypothesized spatial processing during exact, symbolic arithmetic (e.g., 4 + 3 = 7). Participants added and subtracted single-digit numbers and selected the exact solution from responses in the top corners of a computer monitor. While they made their selections using a computer mouse, we recorded the movement of their hand as indexed by the streaming x, y coordinates of the computer mouse cursor. As predicted, hand movements during addition and subtraction were systematically deflected toward the right and the left, respectively, as if calculation involved simultaneously simulating motion along a left-to-right mental number-line. This spatial-arithmetical bias, moreover, was distinct from-but correlated with-individuals' spatial-numerical biases (i.e., spatial-numerical association of response codes, SNARC, effect). These results are the first evidence that exact, symbolic arithmetic prompts systematic spatial processing associated with mental calculation. We discuss the possibility that mathematical calculation relies, in part, on an integrated system of spatial processes.

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Talk about time is commonly accompanied by co-speech gesture. Though much recent work has looked at how time is construed as space in the languages of the world, few studies have examinedtemporal gesturesin any detail. Our focus is on a particular pattern among American English speakers — transversal temporal gestures — in which time is conceptualized as moving from left to right across the body. Based on numerous examples elicited in a controlled observational paradigm, we suggest a classification of American English speakers’ transversal temporal gestures into five types —placing,pointing,duration-marking,bridging, andanimating— and provide examples of each type. Discussion focuses on the following three topics: the usefulness of quasi-experimental approaches for the study of gesture; variation in temporal gestures across cultures; and how temporal gestures fit into a broader understanding of metaphorical gestures.

Many authors in the field of numerical cognition have adopted a rather nativist view that all humans share the intuition that numbers map onto space and, more specifically, that an oriented left-to-right mental number line (MNL) is localized bilaterally in the intraparietal sulcus of the human brain. We review results from archaeological and historical (diachronic) studies as well as cross-cultural (synchronic) ones and contends that these claims are not well founded. The data actually suggest that the MNL is not innate. We argue that the MNL-and number-to-space mappings in general-emerges outside of natural selection proper requiring top-down dynamics that are culturally and historically mediated through high-order cognitive mechanisms such as fictive motion, conceptual mappings, and external representational media. These mechanisms, which are not intrinsically numerical and usually are acquired through education, are not genetically determined and are biologically realized through the systematic consolidation of specific brain phenotypes that support number-to-space mappings.