The temporal focus hypothesis (TFH) proposes that whether the past or the future is conceptualized as being located in front depends on temporal focus: the balance of attention paid to the past (tradition) and the future (progress). How general is the TFH, and to what extent can cultures and subcultures be placed on a single line relating time spatialization and temporal focus in spite of stark differences in language, religion, history, and economic development? Data from 10 Western (sub)cultural groups (N = 1198,) were used to derive a linear model relating aggregated temporal focus and proportion of future-in-front responses. This model then successfully fitted 10 independently collected (sub)cultural groups in China and Vietnam (N = 899). Further analysis of the whole data set (N = 2,097) showed that the group-level relation arose at the individual level and allowed precise quantification of its influence. Finally, in an effort to apply the model to all relevant published data sets, we included recent data from Britain and South Africa: The former, but not the latter, fitted the model well. Temporal focus is a central factor that shapes how people around the world think of time in spatial terms.Keywords Cross-cultural differences . Time . Space . Temporal focus Cronos, a popular personification of time during the Low Roman Empire, was sometimes represented with a four-eyed head, two in the front and two in the back, two looking to the future and two looking to the past (Cirlot, 1992). Why does it make sense to symbolize the past and future as being in front and behind a person? Moreover, why do we intuitively assume that the front eyes look to the future and the back eyes look to the past?Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) proposes that to understand abstract concepts, we borrow structure from other concepts that we have more direct experience with, and therefore understand better. The idea that such conceptual metaphors ground our cognition has become a central part of the theoretical apparatus of embodied approaches to the mind (Barsalou, 2008(Barsalou, , 2010, sparking a research boom in linguistics (Grady, 2010) and cognitive and social psychology (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010;Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009).Understanding time is strongly related to our experience of space. As we move forward, we reach our destination in front Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

Background Investigations of evolution knowledge and acceptance and their relation are central to evolution education research. Ambiguous results in this field of study demonstrate a variety of measuring issues, for instance differently theorized constructs, or a lack of standardized methods, especially for cross-country comparisons. In particular, meaningful comparisons across European countries, with their varying cultural backgrounds and education systems, are rare, often include only few countries, and lack standardization. To address these deficits, we conducted a standardized European survey, on 9200 first-year university students in 26 European countries utilizing a validated, comprehensive questionnaire, the “Evolution Education Questionnaire”, to assess evolution acceptance and knowledge, as well as influencing factors on evolution acceptance. Results We found that, despite European countries’ different cultural backgrounds and education systems, European first-year university students generally accept evolution. At the same time, they lack substantial knowledge about it, even if they are enrolled in a biology-related study program. Additionally, we developed a multilevel-model that determines religious faith as the main influencing factor in accepting evolution. According to our model, knowledge about evolution and interest in biological topics also increase acceptance of evolution, but to a much lesser extent than religious faith. The effect of age and sex, as well as the country’s affiliation, students’ denomination, and whether or not a student is enrolled in a biology-related university program, is negligible. Conclusions Our findings indicate that, despite all their differences, most of the European education systems for upper secondary education lead to acceptance of evolution at least in university students. It appears that, at least in this sample, the differences in knowledge between countries reflect neither the extent to which school curricula cover evolutionary biology nor the percentage of biology-related students in the country samples. Future studies should investigate the role of different European school curricula, identify particularly problematic or underrepresented evolutionary concepts in biology education, and analyze the role of religious faith when teaching evolution.

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Does temporal thought extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? Do asymmetries depend on cultural differences in temporal focus? Some studies suggest that people in Western (arguably future-focused) cultures perceive the future as being closer, more valued, and deeper than the past (a future asymmetry), while the opposite is shown in East Asian (arguably past-focused) cultures. The proposed explanations of these findings predict a negative relationship between past and future: the more we delve into the future, the less we delve into the past. Here, we report findings that pose a significant challenge to this view. We presented several tasks previously used to measure temporal asymmetry (self-continuity, time discounting, temporal distance, and temporal depth) and two measures of temporal focus to American, Spanish, Serbian, Bosniak, Croatian, Moroccan, Turkish, and Chinese participants (total N = 1,075). There was an overall future asymmetry in all tasks except for temporal distance, but the asymmetry only varied with cultural temporal focus in time discounting. Past and future held a positive (instead of negative) relation in the mind: the more we delve into the future, the more we delve into the past. Finally, the findings suggest that temporal thought has a complex underlying structure.

We investigate early word-based categorization by testing one sample of infants at the ages of 14 and 16 months using an object manipulation task. Specifically, we investigate the facilitating effect of labeling on: a) categorization of unknown objects with a shared label and a similar shape; b) categorization of unknown objects with a shared label, but no perceptual similarity. The results indicate that an average infant can categorize novel objects with a similar shape and a shared label starting at 16 months of age. Categorization of novel objects with a shared label but no perceptual similarity is at chance level at both ages. These results confirm and extend previous research findings to a new language.