Cognitive Science: Piecing Together the Puzzle

Abstract

Alongside significant gains in our understanding of the human mind, research in Cognitive Science has produced substantial evidence that the details of cognitive processes vary across cultures, contexts, and individuals. In order to arrive at a more nuanced account of the workings of the human mind, in this letter we argue that one challenge for the future of Cognitive Science is the integration of this evidence of variation with findings which can be generalized.

Life is so Short, Future is so Long: The Relationship between Life History Strategies and People’s Metaphorical Perspectives on Time

“…However, the incorporeity of time means that the apprehension of this abstract concept must depend on the more physically accessible and perceptually rich domain of space (Bender & Beller, 2014;Evans, 2004;Feist & Duffy, 2023a;Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Majid, Gaby, & . Evidence from cross-linguistic studies testifies to the generality of the spatial conceptualization of time with cultural specificities (Feist & Duffy, 2023b). For example, although both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers mentally represent time along the front-back axis (Huang & Tse, 2017), English speakers tend to spatialize past at the back and future in the front, whereas the reverse pattern is found in Mandarin speakers (Gu, Zheng, & Swerts, 2019;Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010), among whom the idiosyncrasy of vertical spatialization of time is also noted (Fuhrman et al, 2011).…”