Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphors are commonly used by individuals to represent and reason about time in daily conversations. These metaphors are often paired with gestures that reveal the possible axes along which our internal conceptualisation of time may be aligned against. The present study attempts to use such gestures as temporal primes to investigate how individuals conceptualize time. Results revealed effects of congruency along the sagittal axis, but not the lateral. This suggests that individuals primarily represent time most strongly along the sagittal axis. Implications for models of how individuals represent time as well as methods of investigating how time is represented in the mind are discussed.