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Across many cultures people conceptualize time as extending along a horizontal Mental Time

Over the last 30 years, numerical estimation has been largely studied. Recently, Castronovo and Seron (2007) proposed the bi-directional mapping hypothesis in order to account for the finding that dependent on the type of estimation task (perception vs. production of numerosities), reverse patterns of performance are found (i.e., under- and over-estimation, respectively). Here, we further investigated this hypothesis by submitting adult participants to three types of numerical estimation task: (1) a perception task, in which participants had to estimate the numerosity of a non-symbolic collection; (2) a production task, in which participants had to approximately produce the numerosity of a symbolic numerical input; and (3) a reproduction task, in which participants had to reproduce the numerosity of a non-symbolic numerical input. Our results gave further support to the finding that different patterns of performance are found according to the type of estimation task: (1) under-estimation in the perception task; (2) over-estimation in the production task; and (3) accurate estimation in the reproduction task. Moreover, correlation analyses revealed that the more a participant under-estimated in the perception task, the more he/she over-estimated in the production task. We discussed these empirical data by showing how they can be accounted by the bi-directional mapping hypothesis (Castronovo & Seron, 2007).

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Tactile perception and motor production share the use of internally- and externally-defined coordinates. In order to examine how visual experience affects the internal/external coding of space for touch and movement, early blind (EB) and sighted controls (SC) took part in two experiments. In experiment 1, participants were required to perform a Temporal Order Judgment task (TOJ), either with their hands in parallel or crossed over the body midline. Confirming previous demonstration, crossing the hands led to a significant decrement in performance in SC but did not affect EB. In experiment 2, participants were trained to perform a sequence of five-finger movements. They were tested on their ability to produce, with the same hand but with the keypad turned upside down, the learned (internal) or the mirror (external) sequence. We observed significant transfer of motor sequence knowledge in both EB and SC irrespective of whether the representation of the sequence was internal or external. Together, these results demonstrate that visual experience differentially impacts the automatic weight attributed to internal versus external coordinates depending on task-specific spatial requirements.

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