The roles of body and mind in abstract thought.
How are people able to think about things they have never seen or touched? We demonstrate that abstract knowledge can be built analogically from more experience-based knowledge. People's understanding of the abstract domain of time, for example, is so intimately dependent on the more experience-based domain of space that when people make an air journey or wait in a lunch line, they also unwittingly (and dramatically) change their thinking about time. Further, our results suggest that it is not sensorimotor spatial experience per se that influences people's thinking about time, but rather people's representations of and thinking about their spatial experience.
Boroditsky
Lera
L
Department of Brain & Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139, USA. lera@mit.edu
Ramscar
Michael
M
D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019222:Mind-Body Relations, Metaphysical; D009039:Motion Perception; D009949:Orientation; D011340:Problem Solving; D013028:Space Perception; D013850:Thinking; D013998:Time Perception