Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People use space to conceptualize abstract domains like timeand number. This tendency may be a cognitive universal, butthe specifics of people’s implicit space-time and space-numberassociations vary across cultures. How does culture shape ourabstract concepts? In Western cultures, both time and numbersare arranged in people’s minds along an imaginary horizontalline, from left to right, but in other cultures the directions of themental timeline (MTL) and mental number line (MNL) arereversed. The directions of both the MTL and MNL have longbeen assumed to depend on the direction in which people readand write text. Here we argue that this assumption is false, andshow that the MTL and MNL are shaped by different aspectsof cultural experience. In a training experiment, participantsspatialized time and numbers in opposite directions across theirfingers. Training changed the MTL and MNL in oppositedirections, as predicted by a general principle called theCORrelations in Experience (CORE) principle: peoplespatialize abstract conceptual domains in their minds accordingto the ways these domains are spatialized in their experience.