Does the habitual reading and writing direction (RWD) affect the aesthetic appreciation of visual art? Pérez González (2012) showed that 19th century Iranian and Spanish professional photographers manifest lateral biases linked to RWD in their compositions. The present study aimed to test whether the general public shows similar biases, and under what conditions. Photographies with left-to-right (L-R) and right-to-left (R-L) directionality were selected from Pérez González's collections and presented in both the original and mirror reversed forms to Spanish (L-R readers) and Moroccan (R-L readers) participants. In Experiment 1, participants rated each picture as to how aesthetically pleasing it was. The results showed no interactions with RWD. In Experiment 2, we presented each picture and its mirror version and asked the participants to choose which one they liked better. Now, clear biases linked to RWD arose. RWD does affect aesthetic impressions of photography in the general public, but only when people are paying attention to the lateral spatial dimension of the pictures.

We investigated the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people’s value temporal focus, religiosity, and time spatialization. Samples of young participants from eight cultures (Americans, Spaniards, Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, Moroccans, Turks, and Chinese) collected before the pandemic (N = 497, mean age = 21.09) were matched with samples collected during the first confinement period (N = 497, mean age = 20.96). Our results in study 1 showed that during the pandemic, young adults were less religious, more future-focused, and placed the future in front to of them in a greater extent. In study 2, using the whole sample collected during the pandemic (N = 893, mean age = 21.94), we observed that the more affected the participants were by the pandemic, the greater their future focus, the lower their religiosity, and the greater their tendency to locate the future in front. These pattern of results held in most cultures.

Is the human representation of time symmetrical or asymmetrical toward the past and the future? Some studies suggestthat we perceive the future as being closer, more attended and more valued than the past (indicating a future asymmetry).By contrast, asymmetries toward the past have been found in past-focused cultures. Yet, available evidence is still limitedand mixed. In the present work we searched for asymmetry in several temporal tasks (temporal distance, time discounting,temporal depth, and self-continuity) in a set of cultures that vary widely in their temporal focus (American, Spanish,Turkish, Chinese, Moroccan, Serbian, Bosniak and Croatian; total N=1075). The results supported an overall asymmetrytoward the future in all tasks, although it failed to be significant in most cultures when considered on their own. However,only self-continuity showed variations that can be explained by the contrast between past-focused versus future-focusedcultures.

The Temporal Focus Hypothesis proposes that a person’s tendency to conceptualize either the past or the future as beinglocated in front of them depends on their temporal focus: the balance of attention paid to the past (tradition) and thefuture (progress). How general is the TFH and to what extent can cultures and subcultures be placed on a single linerelating time spatialization and temporal focus in spite of stark differences in language, religion, history, and economicdevelopment? Data from 10 Western and Middle Eastern (sub)cultural groups (N=1198) were used to derive a linearmodel relating aggregated temporal focus and proportion of future-in-front responses. This model then successfully fittednine independently collected (sub)cultural groups in China and Vietnam (N=841). A logistic mixed model computedover the whole dataset (N=2039) showed that the group-level relation arose at the individual level and allowed precisequantification of its influence. Temporal focus shapes how people around the world think of time in spatial terms.