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The Tangle of Space and Time in Human Cognition Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Table of Contents - Volume 17 Issue 5, May 2013 4/30/13 3:37 PM Active Zone Press Room Jobs Mobile Login Register Alerts Activate Online Access Search Advanced Search FullX Text Authors Home Online Now Current Issue Archive For Authors Journal Information Change Journal May, 2013 Volume 17, Issue 5 Prev Issue Next Issue Time is as elusive as it is fundamental. Editorial Board pi How do humans understand such notions as ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’? On PDF (68 kb) pages 220–229, Rafael Núñez and Kensy Cooperrider explain that, across cultures, humans conceptualize time primarily in Scientific Life: My Word terms of space. They discuss a set of core temporal concepts and their construals across cultures, and highlight Anonymity in science p195 both universal and culture-specific Neuroskeptic patterns in the conceptualization of time. Enlarge Cover Time, they argue, is a mosaic of Abstract | Full Text | PDF (227 kb) construals with distinct properties and origins. Cover image: Detail of the Lakota Long Soldier Winter Count (winter counts are ‘calendars’, Spotlights in which events are recorded by pictures, with one picture representing each year – see the main text for more details). Eyes wide shut: linking brain and pupil in bilingual and monolingual toddlers p197 National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Núria Sebastián-Gallés Catalog number: NMAI 11/6720. Photo by NMAI Photo Services. Muslin cloth, 176 x 88 cm. Reproduced with permission. Abstract | Full Text | PDF (153 kb) Human exceptionalism p199 Barbara L. Finlay, Alan D. Workman Abstract | Full Text | PDF (712 kb) Opinions Where's the action? The pragmatic turn in cognitive science p202 Andreas K. Engel, Alexander Maye, Martin Kurthen, Peter König Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1472 kb) Distributed circuits, not circumscribed centers, mediate visual recognition p210 Marlene Behrmann, David C. Plaut Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1226 kb) May, 2013 Volume 17, Issue 5 Time is as elusive as it is fundamental. How do humans understand such notions as ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’? On pages 220–229, Rafael Núñez and Kensy Cooperrider explain that, across cultures, humans conceptualize time primarily in terms Reviews of space. They discuss a set of core temporal concepts and their construals across cultures, and highlight both universal and culture-specific patterns in the conceptualization of time. Time, they argue, is a mosaic of construals with distinct properties The tangle of space and timeand in humanorigins. Cover cognition image: Detail p220 of the Lakota Long Soldier Winter Count (winter counts are ‘calendars’, in which events are Rafael Núñez, Kensy Cooperrider recorded by pictures, with one picture representing each year – see the main text for more details). National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Catalog number: NMAI 11/6720. Photo by NMAI Photo Services. Muslin cloth, 176 Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1872 kb) x 88 cm. Reproduced with permission. Long-axis specialization of the human hippocampus p230 Jordan Poppenk, Hallvard R. Evensmoen, Morris Moscovitch, Lynn Nadel Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1235 kb) Feature Review Cerebellar networks with the cerebral cortex and basal ganglia p241 Andreea C. Bostan, Richard P. Dum, Peter L. Strick Abstract | Full Text | PDF (3091 kb) http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/issue?pii=S1364-6613(13)X0005-1 Page 1 of 2 Review The tangle of space and time in human cognition 1 2 Rafael Nu´ n˜ ez and Kensy Cooperrider 1 Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA 2 Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA Everyday concepts of duration, of sequence, and of past, crocodiles to human beings have all evolved a variety of present, and future are fundamental to how humans fundamentally different mechanisms – some biochemical, make sense of experience. In culture after culture, con- some emergent from neural networks [2] – for tracking verging evidence from language, co-speech gesture, and time across scales that span from microseconds to days. behavioral tasks suggests that humans handle these Crucially, however, such mechanisms cannot scale up to elusive yet indispensable notions by construing them explain, for instance, the emergence of concepts such as spatially. Where do these spatial construals come from ‘past’ and ‘future’, and the rich inferences they support. and why do they take the particular, sometimes peculiar, These and other time concepts, such as duration and spatial forms that they do? As researchers across the sequence, belong to the realm of high-level cognition: as cognitive sciences pursue these questions on different observed in humans, they are mediated by language and levels – cultural, developmental – in diverse populations culture, but are also firmly rooted in bodily experience and and with new methodologies, clear answers will depend realized by neural mechanisms that are as yet poorly upon a shared and nuanced set of theoretical distinc- understood. Everyday time concepts presumably devel- tions. Time is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of oped as an efficient way of understanding the rich – and construals with distinct properties and origins. yet fundamentally abstract – organization of temporal experience and of coordinating these understandings ‘If men. did not have the same conception of time, with others. space, cause, number, etc., all contact between their But what is the nature of temporal concepts? Over the minds would be impossible, and with that, all life past four decades scholars have converged on the idea that together.’ Emile Durkheim ([1], p. 17) humans conceptualize time primarily in terms of space– a far more tractable domain. Time is spatialized when, for example, an English speaker points backwards while say- Investigating everyday time concepts ing ‘long ago’, when one uses a linguistic metaphor such as The human story, as it has unfolded over thousands of ‘Ski season is approaching’, or when a teacher draws a years in different parts of the world, has largely centered historical timeline running from left to right. The investi- on everyday activities like food gathering and preparation, gation of these ‘spatial construals of time’ (SCTs) has, since tool making, shelter construction, and the anticipation and the 1970s, advanced in partly overlapping waves using observation of rites and rituals. These and other basic diverse methods that range from linguistic analysis and human endeavors depend for their success on a robust cross-cultural fieldwork to psychological experiments and understanding of temporal relations. Yet, time is as elusive more recently neuroimaging. Together, these waves of as it is fundamental. The familiar ‘past’, ‘present’, and research have produced a broad and truly multidisciplin- ‘future’, for instance, are not directly observable, but are ary set of findings. The growing diversity of theoretical central to how humans parse experience. How do humans backgrounds, methods, and populations, however, pre- understand such notions and where do these understand- sents a real challenge, particularly as the field has not ings come from? As a starting point, it may be tempting to yet converged on a set of core theoretical distinctions and search for answers directly in human biology and perhaps methodological standards. In this review, we attempt to specifically in the neural underpinnings of time perception. provide an overarching analysis of the findings to date, Time perception, however, must be distinguished from with an eye toward clarifying several outstanding issues. time ‘conceptualization’, in the same way that thermoper- ception must be distinguished from the everyday concep- Waves of inquiry in time research tualization of temperature. Time perception and time Benjamin Lee Whorf planted early seeds of inquiry (and tracking are ubiquitous in nature, occurring independently controversy) in a 1941 paper in which he contrasted the of human conceptualization. Organisms from amoebas to European concept of time as ‘motion on a space’ ([3], p. 151) with a Hopi concept of time that was devoid of spatial Corresponding author: Nu´ n˜ ez, R. ([email protected]). metaphor. Part of Whorf’s claim would be largely borne out Keywords: time concepts; spatial cognition; temporal cognition; language; gesture; culture. in the 1970s and 1980s, as linguists [4] investigated in detail how English and other European languages draw on 1364-6613/$ – see front matter ß 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.03.008 spatial terms to make temporal distinctions in their core 220 Trends in Cognitive Sciences May 2013, Vol. 17, No. 5 Review Trends in Cognitive Sciences May 2013, Vol. 17, No. 5 grammar (consider the now-archaic spatial senses of deictic center changes, so does the referent of ‘tomorrow’. ‘before’ and ‘after’), in their extended lexicon (consider The B-series, also called ‘tenseless’ or ‘sequence time’ – ‘foresight’ and ‘hindsight’), and in their inventory of com- here ‘S-time’ – concerns the relation of one temporal land- monplace phrases (‘She has a bright career ahead of her’ or mark to another, with no mandatory anchoring to the ‘Back in the age of the dinosaurs’). However, Whorf’s claim present moment. For example, the expression ‘After the about Hopi would be roundly rebutted by an exhaustive storm it will be a nice day’ characterizes the temporal linguistic analysis [5], which showed unmistakable paral- relation between two events, the storm and the nice day lels between the spatial construal of time in Hopi and in that follows it, but this relation does not depend on when English, including treating the past as something ‘back in the sentence is uttered. There is simply no future and no time’ ([5], p. 87). Differences across cultures in everyday past in S-time, just earlier-than and later-than relation- time concepts are real and striking, as described in much ships (Figure 1). more detail below, but they may not run quite as deep as The distinction between D-time and S-time – analyzed Whorf claimed.
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