No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
When Time Passes Quickly: A Cognitive Linguistic Study on Compressed Time
Abstract
Despite the prolific literature on the metaphorical representations of time, research on subjective time has been relatively scarce and limited. Interestingly, the linguistic expression of subjective time manifests an asymmetric pattern, systematically favoring the use of Time-moving, rather than Ego-moving, metaphors (cf. “Time passes quickly” vs ?“We pass (our) time quickly”). The present paper focuses specifically on compressed time (i.e., time as passing quickly) and suggests that the experience of subjective time resonates with a construal that lacks agency on the part of the experiencer. This association explains why the conceptualization of compressed time lends itself to the Time-moving perspective but can also account for expressions that override metaphor. The analysis is based on poetic discourse on the assumption that creativity attests to the affordances of our mental representations. This line of research has implications for possible constraints on metaphorical conceptualization at large.
Neurons called place cells are selectively activated in correspondence with the location or place field that a rodent occupies. In a phenomenon that neuroscientists call replay, place cell activation sequences rapidly repeat during subsequent periods of rest and grooming. Replay has been theorized as a mechanism for reinforcement learning of the spatial trajectories represented by place cell coactivation. Preplay is a competing theory that suggests that these sequences also occur before a novel run and that sequences are not recordings of position made in real time, but rather pre-made repertoires that an organism selects from as it makes a trajectory through space. The preplay theory maintains the language of representation while breaking from the entailment of the conceptual metaphor “MEMORIES ARE RECORDINGS” that recordings are produced simultaneously to the experiences that they represent. It does so through a conceptual blend that affords preplay researchers flexibility in their theorizing about memory without requiring a break from representationalism. Broadly, these findings demonstrate how the blending of conceptual metaphors is a viable approach for the implicit development and contestation of theories of representation in the neural and cognitive sciences.
In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more ‘mundane’, everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.
Film flashbacks are rich multimodal devices that combine a stable pattern of retrospection with formal versatility that provides filmmakers with much space for being creative (Turim 1989; Gordejuela 2021). This chapter focuses on a particular kind of flashbacks where past and present are rendered simultaneously in two possible ways: either the past gets inserted into the present and is merged with it, or a character from the present appears as such in his or her own memories of the past. Through decompression of identity, these flashbacks simultaneously represent two different perspectives (viewpoint compression) and two separate moments in time (time compression) (cf. Dancygier 2012). The chapter illustrates the creative rendering of narrative time in a number of unconventional flashbacks.
The notion of time is common and duly recognized by all people and all languages in the world. However, our perception and conceptualization of time, as evidenced in recent disputing arguments, is not the same across all human languages and cultures. This is probably because time is neither a tangible nor a visible phenomenon. The main objective of this study is to examine the qualities or properties of source domains highlighted by the linguistic expressions used to talk about time in Mfantse, a dialect of the Akan language. (Akan is a Kwa language spoken by a large group of people called Akans and generally mutually intelligible among its widely varied dialects.) I investigate the conceptualizations underlying the concept of time in the Mfantse dialect of Akan by drawing linguistic expressions from texts (the Mfantse Bible), songs, a radio programme broadcast in Mfantse. The study confirms the recognition and acknowledgement of the notion of time in Mfantse and reveals some interesting kinds of metaphors underlying the conceptualization of time within the language, some of which include TIME IS FOOD and TIME IS AN ENEMY.
In English, the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor construes time as moving forward toward the ego. Recent research has provided evidence that people’s metaphorical perspectives on deictic time may be influenced by experiences—both spatial and non-spatial—that are connected to approach motivations (Moving Ego) and avoidance motivations (Moving Time). We extend this research further, asking whether there are differences in preferred temporal perspective between those who exhibit higher and lower degrees of power, as high power has been connected to approach motivations and low power, to avoidance motivations. Across two temporal tasks, participants in our study who adopted high-power poses demonstrated a greater preference for the Moving Ego perspective, compared to those adopting low-power poses. These results suggest an embodied connection between approach and avoidance motivations and the Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors, respectively.
Variation in the passage of time is perceived against the backdrop of standard temporal units. Under certain conditions, we perceive time to be passing slowly. In other settings, our subjective temporal experience is roughly synchronized with the objective time of clocks or calendars. And given different circumstances, we perceive time to have passed quickly. Drawing from 740 narratives that depict distortion in the perceived passage of time, I formulate a theory that accounts for the full range of variation in temporal experience. This theory can be represented by an S-shaped figure. According to this theory, variation in the perceived passage of time reflects variation in the density of experience per standard temporal unit. In turn, the density of experience per standard temporal unit is conditioned by the dynamics of social interaction. In its original form, however, this theory assumes that one’s circumstances shape one’s temporal experience in deterministic fashion. Consequently, based upon interviews with 406 disparate people, I conceptualize time work (or temporal agency) as one’s efforts to control, manipulate, or customize one’s own temporal experience or that of others. I conclude with some directions for future research.
This study looks at different linguistic manifestations of the metaphor TIME IS SPACE in languages of the West and the East, in particular English and the East Asian languages Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Southern Min, Thai and Vietnamese.
Conceptual Integration theorists have recently revised the time is space conceptual metaphor, and proposed a more complex structure of mappings. The result of that network of mappings is a particular event of motion through space, conditioned by its goal to represent time. Coulson and Pagán Cánovas (forthcoming) have studied the timeline as a material anchor for this time-space blend. The timeline facilitates navigation of the time-space blend by presenting temporal relations directly as spatial relations. Through the analysis of Kavafis’ simile of life as a row of candles and Manrique’s metaphor of life as a river, we show that poetic texts can rely on the timeline to build powerful affective meanings.
Abstract
The metaphor TIME AS SPACE across languages
Günter Radden, Hamburg
We mainly understand time metonymically in terms of events and metaphorically in terms of space. This paper is concerned with the structure of the metaphor TIME AS SPACE. The domains of space and time differ in some important respects but also share a number of structural topologies: First, space is three-dimensional, whereas we generally think of time as a one-dimensional line. Second, both the spatial and temporal worlds have static and dynamic situations, i.e., movements. Third, space and time can both be conceived of subjectively and objectively, i.e., with or without the conceptualizer's being on stage.
The structure we associate with time is culturally constructed. Since there are different possibilities of arranging elements in space, we also find different metaphorical models of time, each of which is characterized by its own internal logic. The following structural elements of space allow for conceptual variability in our metaphorical understanding of time:
(i) The orientation of the time-line: The Western view of time takes a front-back orientation, while Chinese also applies the vertical axis in conceptualizing time. In English, an up-down conceptualization of time is also found in expressions such as Our family records reach down to 1707.
(ii) The form of the time-line: Only the "good" geometrical gestalts of a straight line and a full or partial circle are used as spatial metaphors of time. The circle is an appropriate form for representing recurrent, cyclic time as in Our shop is open round the clock.
(iii) The position of time units on the time-line: In conceptualizing time on a horizontal axis, we chiefly think of the future as lying in front and the past as lying behind. In a number of languages, the future is, however, seen as lying behind and the past as lying in front, often combined with a circular model of time.
(iv) The sequencing of time units relative to each other: Both in spatial and temporal sequencing, the observer may adopt two kinds of perspective: the face-to-face or in-tandem perspective. Western cultures take the former perspective as in the day after tomorrow, while Hausa is a language that takes the in-tandem perspective.
Our predominant folk model of time is that of "flowing time": Time flows from the future to the past, as in passing years. In its variant form, the observer moves over stationary time. This model is consistent with the direction of time evolving from the past to the future, but it is inconsistent with the time-flow model.
People move close to things they like and away from things they dislike. Can the same be applied to temporal events? Through alternating between the ego-moving and time-moving metaphorical perspectives of time, people can manage the psychological distance between themselves and various temporal events by staying away from unpleasant experiences and bringing pleasant ones within reach. Consistent with theoretical predictions, 4 studies showed that recalling an unpleasant event from the past prompted the ego-moving perspective, whereas recalling a pleasant past event prompted the time-moving perspective. In contrast, anticipating a pleasant future invoked the ego-moving perspective, whereas anticipating an unpleasant future invoked the time-moving perspective. The valence of feelings explained the systematic shifts in how time is metaphorically understood. These findings highlight the role of basic psychological processes in temporal reasoning. Clinical implications for rumination and mood disorders are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
We formulate a comprehensive theory that accounts for variation in the perception of time. According to our theory, lived time is perceived to pass slowly (protracted duration) when conscious information processing is high; lived time is perceived to be synchronized with clock time (synchronicity) when conscious information processing is moderate; and lived time is perceived to have passed quickly (temporal compression) when conscious information processing is low. We examine that portion of the theory concerning temporal compression in light of empirical materials. Since episodic memory erodes as time passes, we hypothesize that this generates the experience of temporal compression by lowering the density of conscious information processing. Our data were drawn from three different age cohorts, and we find strong support for the hypothesis.
The study of conceptual mappings, including metaphoric mappings, has produced great insights over the last several decades, not only for the study of language, but also for the study of such subjects as scientific discovery, design, mathematical thinking, and computer interfaces. This tradition of inquiry is fulfilling its promises, with new findings and new applications all the time. Looking for conceptual mappings and their properties proves to be a rich method for discovery. To the initial studies that focused on cross-domain mappings and their most visible products have now been added many additional dimensions. Detailed studies have been carried out on topics such as compression, integration networks, and the principles and constraints that govern them. This blooming field of research has as one consequence the rethinking of metaphor. We have a richer and deeper understanding of the processes underlying metaphor than we did previously. In this article, we will illustrate the central areas of theoretical advance by looking in some detail at the metaphor of TIME AS SPACE.
The present manuscript discusses the time-emotion paradox in time psychology: although humans are able to accurately estimate time as if they possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time (i.e. an internal clock), their representations of time are easily distorted by the context. Indeed, our sense of time depends on intrinsic context, such as the emotional state, and on extrinsic context, such as the rhythm of others' activity. Existing studies on the relationships between emotion and time suggest that these contextual variations in subjective time do not result from the incorrect functioning of the internal clock but rather from the excellent ability of the internal clock to adapt to events in one's environment. Finally, the fact that we live and move in time and that everything, every act, takes more or less time has often been neglected. Thus, there is no unique, homogeneous time but instead multiple experiences of time. Our subjective temporal distortions directly reflect the way our brain and body adapt to these multiple time scales.
The present paper evaluates the claim that abstract conceptual domains are structured through metaphorical mappings from domains grounded directly in experience. In particular, the paper asks whether the abstract domain of time gets its relational structure from the more concrete domain of space. Relational similarities between space and time are outlined along with several explanations of how these similarities may have arisen. Three experiments designed to distinguish between these explanations are described. The results indicate that (1) the domains of space and time do share conceptual structure, (2) spatial relational information is just as useful for thinking about time as temporal information, and (3) with frequent use, mappings between space and time come to be stored in the domain of time and so thinking about time does not necessarily require access to spatial schemas. These findings provide some of the first empirical evidence for Metaphoric Structuring. It appears that abstract domains such as time are indeed shaped by metaphorical mappings from more concrete and experiential domains such as space.
The concept of time is elusive to direct observation, yet it pervades almost every aspect of our daily lives. How is time represented, given that it cannot be perceived directly? Metaphoric mapping theory assumes that abstract concepts such as time are represented in terms of concrete, readily available dimensions. Consistent with this, many languages employ spatial metaphors to describe temporal relations. Here we investigate whether the time-is-space metaphor also affects visuospatial attention. In a first experiment, subjects categorized the names of actors in a manner compatible or incompatible with the orientation of a timeline. In two further experiments, subjects categorized or detected left- or right-side targets following prospective or retrospective time words. All three experiments show compatibility effects between the dimensions of space (left-right) and time (earlier-later) and indicate that the concept of time does indeed evoke spatial associations that facilitate responses to targets at spatially compatible locations.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on the feature of conscious life that scaffolds every act of cognition: subjective time.
Our awareness of time and temporal properties is a constant feature of conscious life. Subjective temporality structures and guides every aspect of behavior and cognition, distinguishing memory, perception, and anticipation. This milestone volume brings together research on temporality from leading scholars in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, defining a new field of interdisciplinary research.
The book's thirty chapters include selections from classic texts by William James and Edmund Husserl and new essays setting them in historical context; contemporary philosophical accounts of lived time; and current empirical studies of psychological time. These last chapters, the larger part of the book, cover such topics as the basic psychophysics of psychological time, its neural foundations, its interaction with the body, and its distortion in illness and altered states of consciousness.
Contributors
Melissa J. Allman, Holly Andersen, Valtteri Arstila, Yan Bao, Dean V. Buonomano, Niko A. Busch, Barry Dainton, Sylvie Droit-Volet, Christine M. Falter, Thomas Fraps, Shaun Gallagher, Alex O. Holcombe, Edmund Husserl, William James, Piotr Jaśkowski, Jeremie Jozefowiez, Ryota Kanai, Allison N. Kurti, Dan Lloyd, Armando Machado, Matthew S. Matell, Warren H. Meck, James Mensch, Bruno Mölder, Catharine Montgomery, Konstantinos Moutoussis, Peter Naish, Valdas Noreika, Sukhvinder S. Obhi, Ruth Ogden, Alan o'Donoghue, Georgios Papadelis, Ian B. Phillips, Ernst Pöppel, John E. R. Staddon, Dale N. Swanton, Rufin VanRullen, Argiro Vatakis, Till M. Wagner, John Wearden, Marc Wittmann, Agnieszka Wykowska, Kielan Yarrow, Bin Yin, Dan Zahavi
In About Time, William Friedman provides a new integrated look at research on the psychological processes that underlie the human experience of time. Few intellectual problems are as intriguing or as difficult as understanding the nature of time. In About Time, William Friedman provides a new integrated look at research on the psychological processes that underlie the human experience of time. He explains what psychologists have discovered about temporal perception and cognition since the publication of Paul Fraisse's The Psychology of Time in 1963 and offers fresh interpretations of their findings.
In particular he shows that the experience of time depends on many different psychological processes and that it is essential to divide temporal experience into component categories in order to understand these processes.
In chapters on perception and memory, Friedman discusses our impressions about the rate of time's passage and our ability to localize memories in time. He takes up representation and orientation, our ability to build mental representations of the time structures that surround us and to view these patterns from the unique perspective of the present moment. Moreover he shows that we can learn a great deal about the psychological basis of temporal experience by studying the development of this knowledge in children and the way in which views of time vary by culture, personality type, and kind of psychopathology.
Bradford Books imprint
This study uses the analysis of visual metaphor in 35 graphic illness narratives—book-length stories about disease in the comics medium—in order to re-examine embodiment in traditional Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and propose the more nuanced notion of “dynamic embodiment.” Building on recent strands of research within CMT, and drawing on relevant concepts and findings from other disciplines, including psychology, phenomenology, social semiotics, and media theory, the book develops the argument that the experience of one’s own body is constantly adjusting to changes in one’s individual state of health, sociocultural practices, and the activities in which one is engaged at any given moment, including the modes and media that are being used to communicate. This leads to a more fluid and variable relationship between physicality and metaphor use than many CMT scholars assume. For example, representing the experience of cancer through the graphic illness narrative genre draws attention to the unfathomable processes going on beneath the body’s visible surface, particularly now that digital imaging technologies play such a central role in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. This may lead to a reversal of conventional conceptualizations of knowing and understanding in terms of seeing, so that vision itself becomes the target of metaphorical representations. A novel classification system of visual metaphor, based on a three-way distinction between pictorial, spatial, and stylistic metaphors, is also proposed.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
Our awareness of time and temporal properties is a constant feature of conscious life. Subjective temporality structures and guides every aspect of behavior and cognition, distinguishing memory, perception, and anticipation. This milestone volume brings together research on temporality from leading scholars in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, defining a new field of interdisciplinary research. The book's thirty chapters include selections from classic texts by William James and Edmund Husserl and new essays setting them in historical context; contemporary philosophical accounts of lived time; and current empirical studies of psychological time. These last chapters, the larger part of the book, cover such topics as the basic psychophysics of psychological time, its neural foundations, its interaction with the body, and its distortion in illness and altered states of consciousness. Contributors Melissa J. Allman, Holly Andersen, Valtteri Arstila, Yan Bao, Dean V. Buonomano, Niko A. Busch, Barry Dainton, Sylvie Droit-Volet, Christine M. Falter, Thomas Fraps, Shaun Gallagher, Alex O. Holcombe, Edmund Husserl, William James, Piotr Jaskowski, Jeremie Jozefowiez, Ryota Kanai, Allison N. Kurti, Dan Lloyd, Armando Machado, Matthew S. Matell, Warren H. Meck, James Mensch, Bruno Mölder, Catharine Montgomery, Konstantinos Moutoussis, Peter Naish, Valdas Noreika, Sukhvinder S. Obhi, Ruth Ogden, Alan o'Donoghue, Georgios Papadelis, Ian B. Phillips, Ernst Pöppel, John E. R. Staddon, Dale N. Swanton, Rufin VanRullen, Argiro Vatakis, Till M. Wagner, John Wearden, Marc Wittmann, Agnieszka Wykowska, Kielan Yarrow, Bin Yin, Dan Zahavi © 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
Spatial metaphors for time have often been highlighted, but disanalogies between space and time, which preclude the use of such metaphors, have been comparatively neglected. Yet these disanalogies relate closely to the fundamental nature of time, with its key attributes of extension, linearity, direction, and transience. Of these, only extension is without qualification an attribute of space. Within space, though, we can recognise linear subspaces, on which we can impose a preferred direction, thereby allowing the first three attributes of time to serve as a basis for spatial metaphors. But since space can only acquire the attribute of transience through correlation with time by means of motion, no purely spatial metaphor can capture the transience of time. All metaphors for temporal transience take some kind of change as their source, and hence themselves depend on temporal transience. We cannot describe this aspect of time without lapsing into circularity. Hence time, in its transient aspect, has a sui generis character that cannot be captured by metaphors that do not make use of the very notion to be described: time, as a fundamental and inalienable feature of our experience, will ultimately resist our attempts to explain it in terms of anything else.
"The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it's never gone away. We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool.' What we're saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." -- Hugh Kenner, Johns Hopkins University "In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important." -- Norman Holland, University of Florida
Recent research suggests that people's understanding of the abstract domain of time is dependent on the more concrete domain of space. Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002) found that spatial context influences whether people see themselves as moving through time (ego-moving perspective) or as time moving towards them (time-moving perspective). Based on studies of the embodiment of affective experience, we examined whether affect might also influence which spatial metaphor of time people adopt. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that participants who imagined a negative event were more likely to report that the event was approaching them, whereas those who imagined a positive event were more likely to report that they were approaching the event. Experiments 3a and 3b showed that participants judge an event to be more positive if it is described from the ego-moving perspective than if it is described from the time-moving perspective. Results from these studies provide initial evidence that positive and negative events are associated with different spatial metaphors of time.
reviews various models of psychological time / the view of time as succession is reviewed by considering models that focus on phenomena related to the psychological moment, the psychological present, and memory for temporal order / the view of time as duration is reviewed by considering models that focus on experienced and remembered duration, including chronobiological models, behavioral models, internal-clock models, attentional models, memory models, and a general contextualistic model (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Few intellectual problems are as intriguing or as difficult as understanding the nature of time. In "About Time," William Friedman provides a new integrated look at research on the psychological processes that underlie the human experience of time. He explains what psychologists have discovered about temporal perception and cognition since the publication of Paul Fraisse's "The Psychology of Time" in 1963 and offers fresh interpretations of their findings. In particular he shows that the experience of time depends on many different psychological processes and that it is essential to divide temporal experience into component categories in order to understand these processes.
In chapters on perception and memory, Friedman discusses our impressions about the rate of time's passage and our ability to localize memories in time. He takes up representation and orientation, our ability to build mental representations of the time structures that surround us and to view these patterns from the unique perspective of the present moment. Moreover he shows that we can learn a great deal about the psychological basis of temporal experience by studying the development of this knowledge in children and the way in which views of time vary by culture, personality type, and kind of psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A book describing "the different ways in which man adapts to the temporal conditions of his existence." Sections are devoted to conditioning to time, the perception of time, and control over time. Views of philosophers and early experimental psychologists are represented as well as those based on recent experiments. (567 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek-speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross-dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space-time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation.
How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie people's more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed. People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a long vacation, a short concert). Do people also think about time using spatial representations, even when they are not using language? Results of six psychophysical experiments revealed that people are unable to ignore irrelevant spatial information when making judgments about duration, but not the converse. This pattern, which is predicted by the asymmetry between space and time in linguistic metaphors, was demonstrated here in tasks that do not involve any linguistic stimuli or responses. These findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in our more basic representations of distance and duration. Results suggest that our mental representations of things we can never see or touch may be built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.
- Arstila V.
How time flies: Age, memory, and temporal compression
- M Flaherty
- M Meer
Flaherty, M., & Meer, M. (1994). How time flies: Age, memory, and temporal compression. Sociological Quarterly, 35,
705-721. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1994.tb00424.x
Lived time: Phenomenological and psychopathological studies
- E Minkowski
Minkowski, E. (1970). Lived time: Phenomenological and psychopathological studies. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
- Parker J. A.