Several studies support the psychological reality of a mental timeline that runs from the left to the right and may strongly affect our thinking about time. Ulrich and Maienborn (Cognition 117:126-138, 2010) examined the linguistic relevance of this timeline during the processing of past-and future-related sentences. Their results indicate that the timeline is not activated automatically during sentence comprehension. While no explicit reference of temporal expressions to the left-right axis has been attested (e.g., *the meeting was moved to the left), natural languages refer to the back-front axis in order to encode temporal information (e.g., the meeting was moved forward). Therefore, the present study examines whether a back-frontal timeline becomes automatically activated during the processing of past-and future-related sentences. The results demonstrate a clear effect on reaction time that emerges from a time

Several pieces of evidence suggest that our mental representations of time and space are linked. However, the extent of this linkage between the two domains has not yet been assessed. We present the results of two experiments that draw on the predictions of the dimensional overlap model (Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, Psychological Review 97:253-270, 1990). The stimulus and response sets in these reaction time experiments were related to either time or space. The obtained stimulus-response congruency effects were of about the same size for identical stimulus-response sets (timetime or space-space) and for different stimulus-response sets (time-space or space-time). These results support the view that our representations of time and space are strongly linked.

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Different lines of research suggest that our mental representations of time and space are linked, though the strength of this linkage has only recently been addressed for the front-back mental timeline (Eikmeier, Schröter, Maienborn, Alex-Ruf, & Ulrich, 2013). The present study extends this investigation to the left-right mental timeline. In contrast to what was found in the cited previous study, the obtained space-time congruency effects were smaller than benchmark stimulus-response congruency effects in control conditions. This pattern of results suggests that the representations of time and space are less strongly linked for the left-right axis than for the back-front axis.

The present study is a replication of Sell and Kaschak's (2011) Experiment 1 (Movement Condition). The original stimulus material (short texts compromising three sentences) was translated from English into German. We successfully replicated the basic congruency effect of the original study, that is, the interaction effect between direction of manual response and time reference when participants perform a sensicality judgment. In contrast to the original study, this congruency effect was not significantly modulated by the magnitude of time shift. Nevertheless, when the congruency effect was evaluated separately for large and small time shifts, it was significant for large but not for small time shifts. In sum, this replication reinforces the basic conclusion by Sell and Kaschak that the timeline becomes automatically activated when processing temporal sentence information, especially when the time shift is large.