Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Westerners are reported to more often direct their eyes upward when thinking about the future and downward whenconceptualizing the past. It is unknown whether this vertical space-time mapping is universally true. We studied Mandarinspeakers gaze positions when they mentally displaced themselves for one minute into the past or future. Unlike westerners,Chinese directed their eyes more downward when conceptualizing the future than the past; such effects were not due todifferences in emotion or thinking difficulty between the past and future. Another study of Chinese peoples eyes duringsentence comprehension showed that participants had higher gazing positions when processing past-related sentencesthan when processing future-related sentences. These eye-gaze related correlates of a vertical mental timeline appearedearlier when processing sentences with space-time metaphors than with neutral time expressions. The differences betweenChinese and westerners show that language and culture can shape peoples eye movements when processing time.