Abstract

People use space to conceptualize abstract domains like time and number. This tendency may be a cognitive universal, but the specifics of people's implicit space-time and space-number associations vary across cultures. In Western cultures, both time and numbers are arranged in people's minds along an imaginary horizontal line, from left to right, but in other cultures the directions of the mental timeline (MTL) and mental number line (MNL) are reversed. How does culture shape our abstract concepts? Using time and number as a testbed, we propose and test a general principle, which we call the CORrelations in Experience (CORE) principle, according to which different aspects of experience should selectively affect different abstract concepts. Across 3 training experiments, the MTL was shaped by experiences that provide a correlation between space and time, whereas the MNL was shaped by experiences that provide a correlation between space and number. These findings reveal that the MTL and MNL have distinct experiential bases, supporting the CORE principle and challenging the widespread claim that both mappings are determined by a common set of cultural experiences (e.g., reading, writing, visual scanning). The CORE principle provides an account of how domains like time and number, universal fixtures of the natural world, can be conceptualized in culture-specific ways: People spatialize abstract domains in their minds according to the ways those domains are spatialized in their experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).