Researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have shown that counting hours, days, weeks, and months automatically activates a horizontal mental line in the minds of Russian-speaking participants. The scientists’ work has been published in the journal Language and Cognition.
In the process of evolution, a person has not developed special receptors responsible for the perception of time, therefore people use an additional modality – space. Research by Western scholars has shown that the direction of the emerging mental timeline can be determined by the direction of reading and writing in a particular language.
54 Russian-speaking volunteers participated in the experiment of scientists from the Higher School of Economics. The names of months, days of the week, and hours were dictated, potentially shifting attention to the left (e.g., “Monday”) or right (e.g., “Sunday”) of space. After that, the scientists asked the subjects to indicate the point in the segment in which, in their opinion, this or that word is located.
The results of the experiment confirmed the scientists’ hypothesis that the processing of time units is accompanied by a shift in visual attention and corresponding motor responses in one direction or another. Subjects who heard words with a “left” or “right” place on the mental line shifted their “answer” in the appropriate direction. Also, if the position of the time units on the line coincided with their actual position on the screen, the response time was significantly reduced.
It turns out that the horizontal mental line is activated more often by hours than by days of the week and months. According to scientists, this is because representatives of Russian culture rely on more complex mental schemes – a circle, a school diary layout or a calendar grid – for counting weeks and months.
Source: Ferra
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