ABSTRACT
How are abstract ideas acquired and structured? One idea is that people’s understanding of abstract domains is constructed using more basic, experiential knowledge that is acquired directly. For instance, a series of studies (Boroditsky 2000, Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002) has shown that people’s understanding of time supervenes on their physical conceptions of space, to the extent that manipulations of people’s spatial knowledge have predictable affects on their temporal reasoning. In this paper we explore just how widespread this phenomenon is. To see whether basing abstract knowledge on concrete knowledge is a pervasive aspect of cognition, we investigate whether thought about an abstract, non-literal type of motion called fictive motion (Matlock, 2003a; Talmy, 1996) can influence the way people understand time. Our results suggest that, contrary to previous claims (Jackendoff, 2002), abstract, metaphorical knowledge about motion involves the same structures used in understanding literal motion, and that the activation of these “literal” aspects of fictive motion serve to influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence of the intimate connection between abstract and concrete knowledge.
