Data_Sheet_1_When the Sad Past Is Left: The Mental Metaphors Between Time, Valence, and Space.pdf

<p>A mental metaphor is a strategy that consists of completing the representation of a concept with structural components of a correlating concept. Three issues were addressed here to deepen our understanding of this mechanism: the use of mental metaphors between abstract concepts, the simultaneous activation of multiple mental metaphors and the importance of the focus of attention on the relevant dimensions of a mental metaphor. In two experiments, participants made temporal or valence judgments (with their left or right hand) on verbs with a negative or positive meaning and conjugated in the past or future form, allowing for the simultaneous activation of the “time is space”, “valence is space,” and “time is valence” mental metaphors. Left-past/right-future and left-negative/right-positive congruency effects were found, and these effects were greater in the temporal and valence judgment tasks, respectively, demonstrating the importance of attentional cuing. Simultaneously, a congruency effect between the abstract concepts of time and valence (past-negative/future-positive) was observed, revealing that a mental metaphor can occur between abstract concepts and that multiple metaphors can be processed simultaneously. These results are discussed in terms of different theories within the field of mental metaphors.</p

Registered replication report on Fischer, Castel, Dodd, and Pratt (2003)

The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for embodied number representations and to support strong claims about the link between number and space (e.g., a mental number line). We attempted to replicate Experiment 2 of Fischer et al. by collecting data from 1,105 participants at 17 labs. Across all 1,105 participants and four interstimulus-interval conditions, the proportion of times the effect we observed was positive (i.e., directionally consistent with the original effect) was .50. Further, the effects we observed both within and across labs were minuscule and incompatible with those observed by Fischer et al. Given this, we conclude that we failed to replicate the effect reported by Fischer et al. In addition, our analysis of several participant-level moderators (finger-counting habits, reading and writing direction, handedness, and mathematics fluency and mathematics anxiety) revealed no substantial moderating effects. Our results indicate that the Att-SNARC effect cannot be used as evidence to support strong claims about the link between number and space