Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How we mentally represent spatial relations is known to haveeffects on cognitive processes such as inferences, co-speechgesture, or memorizing. In addition, spatial positions oftenserve as metaphors that carry valence. For instance, “movingup the social ladder, “getting it right”, or being “in front” feelscertainly better than “moving down”, “having two left feet”,or “lagging behind”. Spatial position, however, depends onperspective, more concretely on which frame of reference(FoR) one adopts—and hence on cross-linguisticallydiverging preferences. What is conceptualized as “in front” inone variant of the relative FoR (e.g., translation) is “behind”under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do suchdiverging conceptualizations of an object’s location also leadto diverging evaluations? We tested this with speakers ofGerman, Chinese, and Japanese using an Implicit AssociationTest (IAT). Data from two studies suggest that acrosslanguages the object “in front of” another object is evaluatedmore positively than the one “behind”, and that both locationand evaluation depend on the adopted FoR. In other words:linguistically imparted FoR preferences appear to impact onevaluative processes.