UC San Diego

Time is fundamental to human experience: it plays a central role in our everyday lives; yet, we cannot feel it, touch it or hear it. How are we able to make sense of such

an abstract concept? Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed that our concrete experience of being embodied within and moving through space lays the foundation for how we think about abstract concepts, such as time. This idea has driven much research in the field of Cognitive Science, and dozens of studies have since demonstrated that how we think about time appears to be intimately linked with how we think about space. However, at any given moment, people have numerous spatial resources available to them, in what ways are these resources deployed to structure our thoughts about time?

The studies presented in this dissertation investigate the variety of ways that space is used to structure our thoughts about time (at least in the minds of English speakers). I start with the question: how are different types of temporal relationships associated with space? I then tease apart the use of different spatial axes by deictic and sequence time, using auditory stimuli and vocal responses. These effects are then replicated using visual presentation and manual responses. From there, I ask: what particular aspects of spatial experience are used to structure our thoughts about time? Here, I explore how spatial perspective and bodily motion through space influence how we spatialize time. Next, I examine the role that space plays in reasoning about time by employing a dual-task paradigm designed to interfere with people’s spatial resources during a temporal reasoning task. Finally, I look at what co-speech gesture reveals about how space is used in real time when thinking about time. Together, the psychological experiments and studies of co-speech gesture presented here reveal the flexibility, as well as the limits, of how we use space to structure our thoughts about time. This body of work hopes to draw attention to the richness with which space structures time and to illuminate some possible mechanisms that are responsible for our associations of time with space.