Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Time is often conceptualized spatially. Some argue that this spatialization is essential for understanding time and should manifest reliably in temporal gesture. Here we ask whether people vary in their production of temporal gesture and what this variation might signal about abstract reasoning and communication. Participants (N = 94) watched time-travel narratives, reasoned aloud about the narrative's temporal structure, and later completed a computer assessment of their recollection and comprehension of the narrative's complex temporal structure. We found that participants varied considerably in how often they produced temporal gesture. This variation in temporal gesture was strongly associated with the production of non-temporal representational gesture, suggesting a ‘gestural style' that governs the production of gesture in general. There was no association, however, between temporal gesture and temporal reasoning accuracy. We speculate about the role that temporal gesture might play in larger assemblages of temporal understanding and communication.