Time Is Not More Abstract Than Space in Sound

Time is talked about in terms of space more frequently than the other way around. Some have suggested that this asymmetry runs deeper than language. The idea that we think about abstract domains (like time) in terms of relatively more concrete domains (like space) but not vice versa can be traced to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This theoretical account has some empirical support. Previous experiments suggest an embodied basis for space-time asymmetries that runs deeper than language. However, these studies frequently involve verbal and/or visual stimuli. Because vision makes a privileged contribution to spatial processing it is unclear whether these results speak to a general asymmetry between time and space based on each domain’s general level of relative abstractness, or reflect modality-specific effects. The present study was motivated by this uncertainty and what appears to be audition’s privileged contribution to temporal processing. In Experiment 1, using an auditory perceptual task, temporal duration and spatial displacement were shown to be mutually contagious. Irrelevant temporal information influenced spatial judgments and vice versa with a larger effect of time on space. Experiment 2 examined the mutual effects of space, time, and pitch. Pitch was investigated because it is a fundamental characteristic of sound perception. It was reasoned that if space is indeed less relevant to audition than time, then spatial distance judgments should be more easily contaminated by variations in auditory frequency, while variations in distance should be less effective in contaminating pitch perception. While time and pitch were shown to be mutually contagious in Experiment 2, irrelevant variation in auditory frequency affected estimates of spatial distance while variations in spatial distance did not affect pitch judgments. Results overall suggest that the perceptual asymmetry between spatial and temporal domains does not necessarily generalize across modalities, and that time is not generally more abstract than space

Deconstructing Events: The Neural Bases for Space, Time, and Causality

Space, time, and causality provide a natural structure for organizing our experience. These abstract categories allow us to think relationally in the most basic sense; understanding simple events requires one to represent the spatial relations among objects, the relative durations of actions or movements, and the links between causes and effects. The present fMRI study investigates the extent to which the brain distinguishes between these fundamental conceptual domains. Participants performed a 1-back task with three conditions of interest (space, time, and causality). Each condition required comparing relations between events in a simple verbal narrative. Depending on the condition, participants were instructed to either attend to the spatial, temporal, or causal characteristics of events, but between participants each particular event relation appeared in all three conditions. Contrasts compared neural activity during each condition against the remaining two and revealed how thinking about events is deconstructed neurally. Space trials recruited neural areas traditionally associated with visuospatial processing, primarily bilateral frontal and occipitoparietal networks. Causality trials activated areas previously found to underlie causal thinking and thematic role assignment, such as left medial frontal and left middle temporal gyri, respectively. Causality trials also produced activations in SMA, caudate, and cerebellum; cortical and subcortical regions associated with the perception of time at different timescales. The time contrast, however, produced no significant effects. This pattern, indicating negative results for time trials but positive effects for causality trials in areas important for time perception, motivated additional overlap analyses to further probe relations between domains. The results of these analyses suggest a closer correspondence between time and causality than between time and space

Who\u27s That Knocking at My Door? Neural Bases of Sound Source Identification

When hearing knocking on a door, a listener typically identifies both the action (forceful and repeated impacts) and the object (a thick wooden board) causing the sound. The current work studied the neural bases of sound source identification by switching listeners\u27 attention toward these different aspects of a set of simple sounds during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning: participants either discriminated the action or the material that caused the sounds, or they simply discriminated meaningless scrambled versions of them. Overall, discriminating action and material elicited neural activity in a left-lateralized frontoparietal network found in other studies of sound identification, wherein the inferior frontal sulcus and the ventral premotor cortex were under the control of selective attention and sensitive to task demand. More strikingly, discriminating materials elicited increased activity in cortical regions connecting auditory inputs to semantic, motor, and even visual representations, whereas discriminating actions did not increase activity in any regions. These results indicate that discriminating and identifying material requires deeper processing of the stimuli than discriminating actions. These results are consistent with previous studies suggesting that auditory perception is better suited to comprehend the actions than the objects producing sounds in the listeners\u27 environment

Evidence for a 30-million-word gap across language environments of children withcochlear implants

Hart and Risley (1995) found evidence of a 30-million-word gap by the age of three between children experiencing the mostand the least spoken input. In the present study, we investigated the magnitude of differences in amount of linguistic inputin environments of a clinical population: children with cochlear implants. We identified a 30 million word gap over threeyears between children who received the most and the least spoken language input in their home environments. Further,we identified a 22 million word gap in numbers of infant-directed spoken words experienced by children hearing the mostand the least input. Together, the results suggest that some children with cochlear implants may be doubly disadvantagedin acquiring spoken language, due to the degradation of the speech signal associated with electronic hearing, and due tothe dearth of quality linguistic input in sufficient quantity in their language environments

A sinister bias for calling fouls in soccer.

Distinguishing between a fair and unfair tackle in soccer can be difficult. For referees, choosing to call a foul often requires a decision despite some level of ambiguity. We were interested in whether a well documented perceptual-motor bias associated with reading direction influenced foul judgments. Prior studies have shown that readers of left-to-right languages tend to think of prototypical events as unfolding concordantly, from left-to-right in space. It follows that events moving from right-to-left should be perceived as atypical and relatively debased. In an experiment using a go/no-go task and photographs taken from real games, participants made more foul calls for pictures depicting left-moving events compared to pictures depicting right-moving events. These data suggest that two referees watching the same play from distinct vantage points may be differentially predisposed to call a foul

Time is not more abstract than space in sound

Time is talked about in terms of space more frequently than the other way around. Some have suggested that this asymmetry runs deeper than language. The idea that we think about abstract domains (like time) in terms of relatively more concrete domains (like space) but not vice versa can be traced to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This theoretical account has some empirical support. Previous experiments suggest an embodied basis for space-time asymmetries that runs deeper than language. However, these studies frequently involve verbal and/or visual stimuli. Because vision makes a privileged contribution to spatial processing it is unclear whether these results speak to a general asymmetry between time and space based on each domain\u27s general level of relative abstractness, or reflect modality-specific effects. The present study was motivated by this uncertainty and what appears to be audition\u27s privileged contribution to temporal processing. In Experiment 1, using an auditory perceptual task, temporal duration and spatial displacement were shown to be mutually contagious. Irrelevant temporal information influenced spatial judgments and vice versa with a larger effect of time on space. Experiment 2 examined the mutual effects of space, time, and pitch. Pitch was investigated because it is a fundamental characteristic of sound perception. It was reasoned that if space is indeed less relevant to audition than time, then spatial distance judgments should be more easily contaminated by variations in auditory frequency, while variations in distance should be less effective in contaminating pitch perception. While time and pitch were shown to be mutually contagious in Experiment 2, irrelevant variation in auditory frequency affected estimates of spatial distance while variations in spatial distance did not affect pitch judgments. Results overall suggest that the perceptual asymmetry between spatial and temporal domains does not necessarily generalize across modalities, and that time is not generally more abstract than space