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Eye movements reveal mental looking through time

Stocker, Kurt; Hartmann, Matthias; Martarelli, Corinna S; Mast, Fred W (2016). Eye movements reveal mental looking through time. Cognitive Science, 40(7):1648-1670.

Abstract

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:04 Faculty of Medicine > University Hospital Zurich > Klinik für Konsiliarpsychiatrie und Psychosomatik
Dewey Decimal Classification:610 Medicine & health
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Life Sciences > Cognitive Neuroscience
Physical Sciences > Artificial Intelligence
Language:English
Date:2016
Deposited On:01 Feb 2016 11:47
Last Modified:14 Oct 2024 01:40
Publisher:Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
ISSN:0364-0213
Additional Information:This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Stocker, K., Hartmann, M., Martarelli, C. S. and Mast, F. W. (2015), Eye Movements Reveal Mental Looking Through Time. Cognitive Science. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12301, which has been published in final form at http://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12301. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving (http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-820227.html#terms).
OA Status:Green
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12301
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