Mirror Reading Can Reverse the Flow of Time

How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some cultures but on the left in others. Here we investigated whether experience reading can determine the direction and orientation of the mental timeline, independent of other cultural and linguistic factors. Dutch speakers performed space-time congruity tasks with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard, mirror-reversed, or rotated orthography. When participants judged temporal phrases written in standard orthography, their reaction times were consistent with a rightward-directed mental timeline, but after brief exposure to mirror-reversed orthography, their mental timelines were reversed. When standard orthography was rotated 90 degrees clockwise (downward) or counterclockwise (upward), participants' mental timelines were rotated, accordingly. Reading can play a causal role in shaping people's implicit time representations. Exposure to a new orthography can change the direction and orientation of the mental timeline within minutes, even when the new space-time mapping directly contradicts the reader's usual mapping. To account for this representational flexibility, we propose the hierarchical mental metaphors theory, according to which culturally conditioned mappings between space and time are specific instances of a more general mapping, which is conditioned by the relationship between space and time in the physical world. Conceptualizations of time are culture specific at one level of analysis but may be universal at another.