When time stands upright: STEARC effects along the vertical axis

Dalmaso, Mario; Schnapper, Youval; Vicovaro, Michele

doi:10.1007/s00426-022-01693-9

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 96 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Conversely, based on our study, the spatial associations for time seem not to be automatic but task-dependent. This evidence is similar to the findings by Dalmaso et al 37 who failed to find a vertical STEARC effect in the visual modality, when time was an irrelevant dimension for the task. Interestingly, our results seem in contrast with those by Topić et al 34 , but the different paradigms used by the authors could be the reason of this apparent conflict.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Future studies should also investigate the STEARC effect with vertical and sagittal responses. Although Ishihara et al 1 failed to show an association between onset timing and the sagittal space, no studies have tested the vertical space by using this paradigm (but see the study by Dalmaso and colleagues for visual stimuli 37 ). Furthermore, recent studies found evidence of a compatibility effect between time and the vertical space by using a different paradigm 34 , therefore more studies are needed to further investigate this phenomenon beyond the horizontal axis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conversely, results are less clear for indirect tasks: negative results have been reported for verbal stimuli 34 , while the literature is scarce for perceptual stimuli. To the best of our knowledge, the only studies employing indirect tasks with perceptual (visual) stimuli were the one by Topić et al 34 , which showed the occurrence of spatial–temporal associations, and the one by Dalmaso et al 37 , which showed no STEARC effect. However, there are no studies on spatial–temporal associations employing indirect tasks in the auditory modality.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A systematic investigation reveals that Ishihara et al.’s (2008) STEARC effect only emerges when time is directly assessed

Mariconda

Prpic

Mingolo

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Spatial–TEmporal Association of Response Codes (STEARC) effect (Ishihara et al. in Cortex 44:454–461, 2008) is evidence that time is spatially coded along the horizontal axis. It consists in faster left-hand responses to early onset timing and faster right-hand responses to late onset timing. This effect has only been established using tasks that directly required to assess onset timing, while no studies investigated whether this association occurs automatically in the auditory modality. The current study investigated the occurrence of the STEARC effect by using a procedure similar to Ishihara and colleagues. Experiment 1 was a conceptual replication of the original study, in which participants directly discriminated the onset timing (early vs. late) of a target sound after listening to a sequence of auditory clicks. This experiment successfully replicated the STEARC effect and revealed that the onset timing is mapped categorically. In Experiments 2, 3a and 3b participants were asked to discriminate the timbre of the stimuli instead of directly assessing the onset timing. In these experiments, no STEARC effect was observed. This suggests that the auditory STEARC effect is only elicited when time is explicitly processed, thus questioning the automaticity of this phenomenon.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A systematic investigation reveals that Ishihara et al.’s (2008) STEARC effect only emerges when time is directly assessed

Mariconda

Prpic

Mingolo

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…According to Boroditsky et al (2011), this reflects the presence of specific linguistic metaphors in Mandarin, which are absent in English, linking early/late time concepts with the vertical axis. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that the possible role of language in shaping the spatial mapping of timerelated concepts is a debated topic, as vertical STEARC effects have also been documented in other languages, such as German (e.g., Stocker et al, 2016), Croatian (e.g., Topić et al, 2022), and, more relevant to the present context, Italian (e.g., Dalmaso et al, 2023a). In summary, the literature examining possible STEARC effects for face age is still limited; it is not conclusive and requires additional research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Face Age is Mapped Into Three‐Dimensional Space

Dalmaso,

Pileggi,

Vicovaro

2023

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People can represent temporal stimuli (e.g., pictures depicting past and future events) as spatially connoted dimensions arranged along the three main axes (horizontal, sagittal, and vertical). For example, past and future events are generally represented, from the perspective of the individuals, as being placed behind and in front of them, respectively. Here, we report that such a 3D representation can also emerge for facial stimuli of different ages. In three experiments, participants classified a central target face, representing an individual at different age stages, as younger or older than the reference face of 40 years. Manual responses were provided with two keys placed along the horizontal axis (Experiment 1), the sagittal axis (Experiment 2), and the vertical axis (Experiment 3). The results indicated that the younger faces were represented on the left/back/top side of the space, whereas the older faces were represented on the right/forward/bottom side of the space. Furthermore, in all experiments, the latencies decreased with the absolute difference between the age of the target face and that of the reference face (i.e., a distance effect). Overall, this work suggests that the spatial representation of time includes social features of the human face.

show abstract

“…A study of Spanish and English speakers showed that reaction time was shortened when participants were required to respond to “future” words with their right hands and to “past” words with their left hands ( Ouellet et al, 2010 ). Other researchers have suggested that a vertical bias also affects the responses ( Dalmaso et al, 2022 ). He et al (2018) showed that reaction time was shortened when a response cue was presented on the top-left part of a screen following the presentation of a priming word linked to the past and vice versa.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A pilot study of how the past, present, and future are represented in three-dimensional space

Yabe

Yamada

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Numerous studies have shown that the representation of temporal concepts is associated with spatial features such as position and size. In a conventional task called the “Circle Test (CT),” participants are asked to express the relative importance of the past, present, and future and to demonstrate relationships among them by drawing three circles representing the past, present, and future. Studies on various participants, including refugees, patients living with serious illnesses, and adolescents, have used it to understand the temporal perspectives of different test takers. On the other hand, several studies have suggested that concepts of time are represented in three-dimensional (3D) space. It is expected that temporal concepts of the past, present, and future could be recorded using a 3D drawing task. Here we created a 3D version of CT (the “Sphere Test [ST]”) to investigate the sagittal representation of time and to record the relative time importance and relatedness, allowing for the shielding relationships and the laws of perspective. We conducted experiments with university students to compare the results from the CT and the ST. Our results suggested that not all on-screen overlapping can be interpreted as representing a connection between two time zones in 3D space. We also found correlations between the chosen sizes of the three circles in the CT and ST, i.e., the on-screen sizes of the past and present circles were positively correlated. In contrast, we observed no correlation between the on-screen sizes of the future circles in the two tests. The alignment pattern along the sagittal axis showed different patterns from the horizontal and vertical axes. In conclusion, this study sheds new light on the third dimension of the spatial representation of time and may help us understand the relationship between temporal perspectives and other factors, including mental health.

show abstract

When time stands upright: STEARC effects along the vertical axis

Cited by 12 publications

References 96 publications

A systematic investigation reveals that Ishihara et al.’s (2008) STEARC effect only emerges when time is directly assessed

A systematic investigation reveals that Ishihara et al.’s (2008) STEARC effect only emerges when time is directly assessed

Face Age is Mapped Into Three‐Dimensional Space

A pilot study of how the past, present, and future are represented in three-dimensional space

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About