Broadcasting heavyweights go head-to-head on the embodiment of abstract concepts
Let’s start off with a game: spot the difference.
Ignoring trivial aesthetics – how does the BBC and Sky Sports Premier League tables differ? Unfortunately for Tottenham fans, Arsenal are top of both tables – 12 points clear of their North London neighbours (at the time of writing). The actual difference involves a rivalry far more decisive: splitting local streets and even families. Of course, I am talking about the order of the last five results.
Before we go any further – consider the following…
Your team wins four games before drawing their fifth (and most recent) game. Which of the 'form guides' most intuitively reflects their past results?
W W W W D
D W W W W
BBC use a left-to-right (LTR) form guide, where the game furthest in the past is on the left and this progresses to the most recent on the right. Sky Sports do the opposite: the most recent game is on the left, using right-to-left (RTL) sequencing.
Whether we believe the BBC or Sky Sports has the correct or intuitive way to present previous results may seem trivial – but it doesn't only reflect how we conceptualise time, but sheds light on the fundamental nature of our cognitive processing.
Are you feeling a bit down today, did you think the Banshees of Inisherin was a bit dark? It is clear our sensorimotor experiences have crept into everyday language. However, far from being simply a characteristic of linguistics, how our motor and perceptual systems interact with our environment shapes the way we think.
We use our direct physical and social experiences to map or ground abstract concepts onto concrete experience-based domains. Embodied cognition – that many features of our cognition are influenced by our bodily states can be readily evidenced in language, but also perception, memory, learning, reasoning, emotion, and even morality. Studies have shown that energy levels impact estimations of distance and elevation, inducing disgust through smell can change decisions in moral dilemmas, and bodily positions can modulate emotional affect (although some of these have been caught up in the replicability crisis)
Metaphors we live by provides a comprehensive overview of how our body shapes abstract thought – but here we are interested in our conceptualisation of time.
Now, consider the following…
Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward 2 days. What day is the meeting, now that it has been rescheduled?
Monday
Friday
Regarding how we map the abstract (time) onto the concrete (body), researchers have made the distinction between Time-moving and Ego-moving embodied perspectives. If you are a Time-mover – events move regarding a fixed observer from future to past: “the derby is coming up” or “the season went quickly”. For Ego-movers – the observer moves forward toward fixed future events “We are approaching the crunch-end of the season” or “we left those Emery days behind”.
Interpretation of the meeting ambiguity above is different depending on this embodiment. For Time-movers, where time moves towards a stationary ego, then moving the meeting forward is moving it closer to the ego: it’s now on Monday. For Ego-movers, where the ego is conceived as moving forward through time, then future events are farther ahead relative to the ego’s motion: it’s now on Friday.
Interestingly, this isn’t a fixed-trait – real or imagined physical motion can shift us to the Ego-moving perspective, and stationary observers of real or imagined objects moving toward themselves are shifted towards the Time-moving perspective. While this would explain confusion with communicating shifting kick-off times, as far as I know, no studies have investigated how embodied perspectives impact left/right direction perception.
So perhaps we should explore cultural rather than pure cognitive variation to explain our spatial representations of time. There is clear evidence that the direction of different writing systems influences non-linguistic aspects of spatial cognition, including the active production of sequential arrangements. For English speakers, the LTR writing pattern establishes a spatial representation where left is the start, and proceeds towards the right (in contrast to, say, Taiwanese speakers).
Our LTR directionality-bias for sequences is extended to our spatial representation of time. Despite their being no linguistic traces in our languages – westerners judge tenses of written words consistently with a LTR conceptual metaphor.
Look around, the LTR spatial representation is embedded into our visualisations of time – clock-wise reflects a wheel moving from LTR, progress bars extend from LTR, and you swipe right when they are one for the future and left to leave them in your past (maybe).
Not only does the cultural origins for the LTR spatial representation of time (handwriting direction) reveal the role our sensorimotor experience plays on the cognitive processing of abstract concepts, but it also reflects the critical role the body plays in cultural development itself.
Although not fully known, prominent theories suggest that most modern languages in Europe, North America, South America, India and Southeast Asia developed their scripts after the paper-making industry emerged (~100 BC). Because most individuals are right-handed, adopting a LTR script avoided ink from smudging on paper. The opposite is true for ancient Semitic languages where writing RTL would reduce injury risk for right-handers when chiselling into hard surfaces.
So, who is right – BBC or Sky Sports? The typical LTR western handwriting style is derived from the emergence of paper over 2000 years ago. This sensorimotor experience maps the abstract concept of time onto a concrete experience-based domain. Our sequencing and spatial representation of time therefore follows a LTR direction, suggesting the BBC form guide is consistent with typical western spatial cognitive processing.
Preference variation does exist, though – and I would love to see research investigating whether preference for the BBC and Sky Sports form guides varies in accordance with embodied perspectives of time.
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