[MD] Time and space - things RMP has thought about

[Michael R. Brown]

We think about time in terms of space, as revealed in the way we talk 
about it ("looking ahead to our future"; "looking back at our past") and 
in the results from psychology experiments. For instance, people from 
countries that write right-to-left find it easier to associate future 
events with the right-hand side of space. This begs the question - how 
much space do we think time takes up, and is it always constant, or does 
it vary with how richly we represent particular episodes?

Brittany Christian 
<http://www.abdn.ac.uk/psychology/people/details/r03bc11>and her 
colleagues have explored this question with a pair of fascinating 
studies. The first involved 60 participants (aged 18 to 32 years) 
marking the position of various birthdays on a 36cm horizontal line. The 
middle of the line was marked as "now". Some participants were asked to 
draw a mark to show the position of their 8th and 9th birthdays, their 
previous and next birthdays (relative to now), and their 58th and 59th 
birthdays, representing past, present and future periods of time, 
respectively. Other participants did the same for the equivalent 
birthdays of a best friend; others did it for a stranger who shared the 
same birth date as them.

The key result here was that participants indicating their own birthdays 
tended to leave a larger gap between their previous and next birthdays, 
as compared with participants who marked the birthdays of a best friend. 
In turn, those marking the birthdays of a best friend left a larger gap 
between previous and next birthdays than did participants who marked the 
birthday positions of a stranger. No contrasts emerged for gaps between 
birthdays in the further past or future (8th and 9th or 58th and 59th), 
perhaps because we represent such distant time more generically. The 
main result suggests that the more richly we encode past and future 
events in our minds, the more physical space we allocate to our mental 
representation of those periods.

A second study was similar but this time 63 participants (aged 18 to 32) 
controlled their passage backwards or forwards through time, an 
experience that was created using the optic flow of white dots on a 
computer screen. The contraction of the dots towards the centre creates 
the sensation of moving backwards, the expansion of dots outwards gives 
the feeling of travelling forwards. Using a keypad to control their 
motion, the participants were asked to move forward or backwards through 
time until they reached various birthdays up to ten years in the past or 
future. As in the first study, they did this either for their own 
birthdays, the birthdays of a friend, or a stranger.

Participants chose to travel through more space to reach birthday events 
in their own lives, compared with the space they travelled when 
journeying towards a friend's same birthdays. Participants traversed the 
least amount of space to reach those birthday dates in the life of a 
stranger. These differences were true for past events and future events, 
and they held across the full span of time that was investigated (i.e. a 
birthday up to ten years in the past or future).

Christian and her colleagues said their finding was consistent with 
construal level theory: "more space is allocated to events that feature 
self-relevant and episodically rich (i.e. more concrete) mental 
representations." Future research is needed to see if other factors also 
affect the amount of space allocated to temporal representations, such 
as factual knowledge or emotional salience. Would we allocate more space 
to time in the life of someone who we like but don't know well, or to 
someone we know well, but don't like?

The researchers said the "behavioural implications of these findings 
remains an important challenge for future". It's speculative for now, 
but they surmised that their results could help make sense of the 
planning fallacy - our tendency to underestimate how long things will 
take us, compared with others. The fact that we represent our own time 
with more space could tempt us to feel like we can get more done in a 
given period.

- 
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2013/01/time-travel-study-shows-my-years-take.html