Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT

Mapping spatial frames of reference onto time: A review

of theoretical accounts and empirical findings
Andrea Bender ⇑, Sieghard Beller
Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, N-5020 Bergen, Norway

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: When speaking and reasoning about time, people around the world tend to do so with
Received 15 May 2013 vocabulary and concepts borrowed from the domain of space. This raises the question of
Revised 30 November 2013 whether the cross-linguistic variability found for spatial representations, and the principles
Accepted 31 March 2014
on which these are based, may also carry over to the domain of time. Real progress in
addressing this question presupposes a taxonomy for the possible conceptualizations in
one domain and its consistent and comprehensive mapping onto the other—a challenge
Keywords:
that has been taken up only recently and is far from reaching consensus. This article aims
Space
Time
at systematizing the theoretical and empirical advances in this field, with a focus on
Frames of reference accounts that deal with frames of reference (FoRs). It reviews eight such accounts by
Temporal perspectives identifying their conceptual ingredients and principles for space–time mapping, and it
Mental time line explores the potential for their integration. To evaluate their feasibility, data from some
Space–time mapping thirty empirical studies, conducted with speakers of sixteen different languages, are then
scrutinized. This includes a critical assessment of the methods employed, a summary
of the findings for each language group, and a (re-)analysis of the data in view of the
theoretical questions. The discussion relates these findings to research on the mental time
line, and explores the psychological reality of temporal FoRs, the degree of cross-domain
consistency in FoR adoption, the role of deixis, and the sources and extent of space–time
mapping more generally.
Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction 2010); and spatial primes can be used to influence the

When speaking about time, people around the world
tend to do so with vocabulary and concepts borrowed from
the domain of space (Alverson, 1994; Clark, 1973;
Haspelmath, 1997; Traugott, 1978). This link reaches
beyond the extension of word meaning. For instance,
co-speech gestures often add a spatial dimension to
temporal expressions (Núñez, Cooperrider, Doan, &
Wassmann, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006); postural sway
is affected by whether people embark on a mental time
travel into the future or the past (Miles, Nind, & Macrae,
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: Andrea.Bender@psysp.uib.no (A. Bender).
experience of duration (DeLong, 1981), visuospatial atten-
tion (Torralbo, Santiago, & Lupiáñez, 2006; Weger & Pratt,
2008), or reasoning about time (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar,
2002; Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002). In fact, time and
space, together with quantity, appear to be computed by a
generalized magnitude system of the brain (Walsh, 2003),
with temporal relations being mapped onto spatial repre-
sentations, but not vice versa (Casasanto & Boroditsky,
2008; Casasanto, Fotakopoulou, & Boroditsky, 2010), at
least in humans (Merritt, Casasanto, & Brannon, 2010).
In parallel, evidence has accumulated that different
groups of people conceptualize space in different ways
(Bennardo, 2002; Haun, Rapold, Call, Janzen, & Levinson,
2006; Haun, Rapold, Janzen, & Levinson, 2011; Levinson,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.03.016
0010-0277/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Majid, Bowerman, Kita,
Haun, & Levinson, 2004; Senft, 1997), and this raises
important questions. If, for instance, the link between
space and time is indeed universal, should we then expect
that the cross-cultural variability found for spatial repre-
sentations will carry over to the domain of time? And to
what extent might culture-specific ways of talking about
space also structure talking about time? Real progress in
addressing these questions, we argue, presupposes a tax-
onomy for the possible conceptualizations in one domain
and its concise and comprehensive mapping onto the
other. Such a harmonizing of terminology would facilitate
not only cross-domain comparisons in general, but also the
assessment of the influence of spatial representations on
temporal ones in particular, and is therefore currently con-
sidered to be one of the important desiderata in this field of
research (Bender, Rothe-Wulf, Hüther, & Beller, 2012;
Tenbrink, 2011).
However, while research in the two domains and the
acknowledgement of cross-domain transfers do have a
long tradition in several disciplines (reviewed in Núñez &
Cooperrider, 2013), the challenge of mapping a taxonomy
of spatial representations onto the domain of time has
been taken up only recently. During the last decade,
respective attempts have mushroomed, but although sev-
eral of them even sail under the same flag as ‘‘temporal
frames of reference’’, they differ considerably in terms of
theoretical conceptualization and subsequent interpreta-
tion of data—to the extent of being incompatible with each
other. All too often it has been left to the reader to figure
out how these accounts are related to each other, to spatial
taxonomies, and to the empirical data accumulated during
recent years. Núñez and Cooperrider therefore conclude
that ‘‘despite intuitive appeal and promise of parsimony,
a definitive taxonomy of ‘temporal frames of reference’
remains elusive’’ (2013, p. 221). With our review, we
attempt to systematize the theoretical and empirical
advances in this field, by sorting the temporal accounts
proposed so far according to their similarities and differ-
ences, by comparing the principles according to which they
map spatial taxonomies onto time, and by scrutinizing the
available data with regard to how they would be inter-
preted in the light of each of these accounts.
More specifically, we begin (in Section 2) by describing
the theoretical and conceptual ingredients on which most
of the accounts are based, including a brief outline of the
properties and variants of the concept TIME and of the con-
ceptual sources for the construal of temporal taxonomies.
In Section 3, we provide an overview of the different
taxonomies, followed, in Section 4, by their systematic
comparison according to the relations they establish
between conceptual sources, the principles they adopt for
construing frames of reference and for assigning FRONT,
and the reference patterns they distinguish.
The second part of this review is then devoted to a
(re-)analysis of the available empirical data, collected
partly as evidence for conceptual innovations of specific
accounts and partly with the goal of assessing cross-
cultural variability. Based on an overview of the methods
employed (Section 5), findings are first presented sepa-
rately for each speech community (Section 6), and are then
343
discussed with regard to their theoretical implications
(Section 7). The potential for integration is outlined in
the conclusion (Section 8).
Before doing so, two constraints need to be explicated
and one clarification should be made. First, this review
does not presuppose that all temporal conceptualizations
are derived from space. In fact, some properties of time
and temporal entities cannot be spatialized (Galton,
2011), and some linguistic groups appear to generalize this
to the whole domain of time (e.g., Sinha, Da Silva Sinha,
Zinken, & Sampaio, 2011, and see Section 6.9 below). How-
ever, as the main thrust of this paper is to provide an over-
view of temporal taxonomies based on the spatialization of
time, it will focus on temporal conceptualizations derived
from space. Second, this review will be restricted to theo-
retical accounts that are based on, or at least related to,
some type of frames of reference (FoRs) taxonomy. While
there may be other taxonomies of spatial conceptualiza-
tions (and more options for mapping them onto time), this
restriction is justified by the fact that most of the accounts
that have been proposed recently and that are of relevance
for this review have chosen this approach. And finally, our
usage of the terms ‘‘cultural’’ and ‘‘linguistic’’ requires
some a priori clarification. Although we basically utilize
cross-linguistic data (i.e., data collected in groups speaking
different languages), we will adopt the term ‘‘cultural’’
whenever preferences for some kind of FoR are referred
to. The rationale for this is that preferences for FoRs within
a speech community are not inherent in the meaning of
words, or in any language-specific feature for that matter,
but are a result of agreements or conventions within a
speech community—which we take to be a cultural
phenomenon.
Throughout this paper, some abbreviations will be used
as a compromise between conciseness and readability
(explained in Table 1, upper part). We also attempt to
use the same terms throughout the paper when referring
to the same referents; in cases where being faithful to
alternative accounts requires deviations from this termi-
nology (for an overview, see Table 1, lower part), we will
add the labels preferred in this review in square brackets.
2. The domain of time and its relation to space
Time is an abstract domain in the sense that it is intan-
gible and ephemeral, and that we lack sensory organs to
perceive it directly. The ability to process temporal infor-
mation is based on two distinct computational mecha-
nisms (Pöppel, 1997; Pöppel & Wittmann, 1999), and the
awareness of the passing of time is linked to memory pro-
cesses (Lewis & Miall, 2006). But our attempts to capture
time conceptually seem to hinge to a considerable degree
on metaphorical extension (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980,
1999). While not the only possible candidate (Evans,
2003), one domain which suggests itself as a source for
such a metaphorical extension is space. Not only is space
more concrete than time; it is also linked in various ways
to the latter, for instance in all processes of change or
motion. But before we turn to the various ways in which
space is fundamental to time, thus allowing for the transfer
344 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382

Table 1
Abbreviations and variations of technical terms as used in this paper.

Abbreviations
FoR frame of reference
s-FoR spatial frame of reference
t-FoR temporal frame of reference
F Figure; also: ‘‘referent R’’ (see below)
G Ground; also: ‘‘relatum’’ (Tenbrink, 2011) or ‘‘reference point RP’’ (see below)
V observer’s viewpoint (in temporal contexts often equated with Ego)
X origin (origo) of the coordinate system in establishing a FoR; in ternary relations (relative FoR), X is transferred from V into G, which
then becomes the origo of the secondary coordinate system (X2)
RP reference point (as used by Núñez & Sweetser, 2006, and Yu, 2012) [= G]
R referent (as used by Yu, 2012) [= F]
ME moving Ego (perspective); also: ‘‘Ego-moving’’ (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner et al., 2002)
MT moving time (perspective); also: ‘‘time-moving’’ (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner et al., 2002)
Technical terms preferred for this paper, and some of their variants
absolute FoR also referred to as: ‘‘field-based’’ (Talmy, 2000; and see Moore, 2004, 2011) or ‘‘extrinsic’’ (Kranjec, 2006)
intrinsic FoR also referred to as: ‘‘ground-based’’ (Talmy, 2000)
relative FoR also referred to as: ‘‘projector-based’’ (Talmy, 2000), ‘‘deictic’’ (e.g., Kranjec, 2006), ‘‘egocentric’’, or ‘‘viewer-centered’’ (elsewhere in
the literature)

Note. Some terms are used in capital letters when they denote concepts of things (as the concept of TIME) or, in the specific case of FRONT, do distinguish FRONT
assigned to entities or fields from ‘‘front’’ in the ‘normal’ sense.

of spatial conceptualizations to time in the first place
(Moore, 2011), we need to explicate the ways in which
space and time differ.
2.1. Properties and concepts of time
and to compare these taxonomies in a constructive man-
ner, the following aspects need to be explicated: (i) the
extent to which properties of time itself can (or cannot)
be mapped onto the spatial dimension, (ii) the extent to
which concepts of time may vary, and (iii) the ways in
which the directionality of time can be assessed.

Attempts to describe and analyze time are plentiful (for

overviews see, e.g., Evans, 2003; Friedmann, 1990; Le 2.1.1. Properties of time
Poidevin, 2003; Newton-Smith, 1980), and we will not According to Galton’s (2011) commendable analysis,
repeat these here. But in order to identify the conceptual time has four distinct properties (or attributes), which it
ingredients of space-based taxonomies of temporal FoRs shares—to varying degrees—with space: extension, linear-

Table 2
Properties of time and how they can (or cannot) be mapped onto the spatial dimension (for more details, see Galton, 2011); further
explanation is given in the text.
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
Table 3
Concepts of time.
ity, directionality, and transience. Extension implies that
time has separate parts (such as distinct moments); linear-
ity implies that of any three distinct moments, one has to
be between the other two; directionality implies an asym-
metry between past and future; and transience implies
the fleetingness of every single moment. These four prop-
erties constitute an ordered series, with extension being
foundational to linearity, which itself is foundational to
directionality, which is foundational to transience (see
Table 2).
Parallel to this increase in hierarchical order, the extent
to which these properties can be mapped onto space
decreases. While mapping is straightforward for the prop-
erty of extension, it is possible for linearity only if any one of
the three dimensions of space is singled out. Please note
that this may also include closed loops. In addition to the
restriction to one dimension, the mapping of asymmetry
from time to space also requires consideration of specific
conditions under which this property may emerge: The
asymmetry between UP and DOWN relies on gravitation,
the asymmetry between FRONT and BACK on the anatomy of
the human body, and the asymmetry between LEFT and
RIGHT (largely) on cultural values. A less obvious, but none-
theless valid, asymmetry also emerges from the half-axes
that are radiating out from a central point, namely along
the TOWARDS/AWAY FROM, NEAR/FAR, or INWARDS/OUTWARDS dimen-
sion. Transience, finally, is the only property of time that
space cannot have in and of itself. However, space can
acquire it by being linked to time, as in motion (Galton,
2011). When traveling by train, for instance, the places
passed by are transient in a way similar to the elapsed
moments. In contrast to changes of place during motion,
changes of state involve only a negligible spatial compo-
nent and thus might be regarded as almost purely tempo-
ral. This temporal transience is captured by a concept of
time not as spatially extended, but simply as a perpetual
‘‘getting later’’, as has been described for the Hopi by
Whorf (1956; and see Malotki, 1983).
When time is metaphorically mapped onto space, the
property of extension leads to the description of events as
‘‘occupying space’’ or being ‘‘in the middle of’’ something.
Linearity affords linguistic metaphors of duration, but also
graphic and other representational metaphors (as in writ-
345
ing, musical notation, the time axis of graphs, or the design
of clocks). Directionality allows for the mapping of asym-
metric spatial axes onto time, as in the mapping of past
and future to the TOP/DOWN axis in Mandarin (Scott, 1989)
or as in the Moving Ego (ME) and Moving Time (MT) met-
aphors to be described below (Clark, 1973; Fillmore, 1971).
As the ME/MT metaphors also involve motion, they make
additional use of the property of transience (Galton, 2011).
Of these properties, the latter three will be of relevance for
the remainder of this paper: linearity for the concept of cycli-
cal time (to be discussed in the next section); directionality
for the asymmetric properties of time and temporal concepts,
which is essential for the assignment of FRONT and thus for the
construal of temporal FoRs; and transience for dynamic con-
texts that involve real or metaphorical motion.
2.1.2. Conceptual variants of time
Three fundamentally different concepts of time will be
considered in this review: linear, cyclical, and radial time
(see Table 3).
The concept of linear time is compatible with the expe-
rience of passing time and the irreversible courses of
events. Typically, this concept also implies directionality,
aptly illustrated in the metaphor of an ‘‘arrow of time’’
(Section 2.1.3). Its directionality is reflected, for instance,
in diagrammatic depictions that are oriented towards the
future (Galton, 2011), and it structures the canonical way
in which we recount history or tell stories.1 Cognitive sci-
entists tend to consider the linear concept as the prevailing
concept of time in human thinking, and conceptualize its
representation by a mental time line (Walsh, 2003; and
see Miles et al., 2010; Weger & Pratt, 2008).
While the concept of linear time seems to directly
spring from the property of linearity, the latter also affords
a concept of cyclical time, except that in this case the line
forms a closed loop (Galton, 2011; and see Le Poidevin,
2003; Newton-Smith, 1980). The concept of cyclical time
1
This structure can be violated, of course, for various reasons, and if done
artistically—as in the movie Memento (2000), directed by Christopher
Nolan—this violation may be experienced as fascinating. However, one of
the very reasons for the positive reviews of Memento was that its nonlinear
narrative structure was considered unique and original.
346 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
is compatible with our experience of recurring time peri-
ods that structure our life, such as times of the day, days
of the week, seasons, or annual holidays and feasts, and
recurring events, such as the life cycles of plants and
animals. It has been described for several non-Western
cultures such as Hinduism (Sharma, 1974), the Hopi
(Malotki, 1983; Whorf, 1956), or the Maya (Farriss, 1987;
León-Portilla, 1990). The linear and the cyclical concept
can be reconciled and integrated into a spiral or helic
concept according to which types of events do recur, but
at different points in time and in a non-reversible order.
The concept of radial (or ego-centric) time, finally,
reflects the precision of memory (of the past) and
anticipation (of the future), which is most pronounced
for proximal events and decreases with distance from the
subjective now, symmetrically into past and future. Like
the aforementioned linear and cyclical concept, it is
compatible with, and in fact follows directly from, the
property of directionality when mapped onto space. How-
ever, as outlined above, the mapping of the asymmetry
property from time to space requires a consideration of
specific conditions under which this property may emerge,
and one of these conditions involves the half-axes radiat-
ing out from a central point (Galton, 2011). Illustrative
examples of this radiation are the loudness of sound or
the brightness of light emitted from a single source, or
the field of vision or attention from the point of view of
any given observer. The concept of radial time has received
the least amount of attention (but see Bennardo, 2009),
and although it has been predicted to occur in speech com-
munities, which prefer a relative (or ego-centric) FoR for
temporal descriptions (Bender, Bennardo, & Beller, 2005),
it remains unclear whether it only characterizes temporal
aspects of cognitive processes or may also serve to struc-
ture representations of time (as claimed by Bender,
Beller, & Bennardo, 2010).
2.1.3. The arrow of time
An implication of Galton’s (2011) third property of time
is the asymmetry between past and future, also labeled
‘‘arrow of time’’. This notion deserves particular attention
here as it will be essential in some accounts for construing
an absolute FoR. While most physical processes are sym-
metrical with regard to time (i.e., they could be reversed
without violating physical laws), some appear to unfold
over time from past to future. The increase of entropy,
for instance, described by the second law of thermodynam-
ics, bestows a direction onto the flow of time; and the same
holds for the expansion of the universe, for radiation and
radioactive decay, or for the course of biological evolution
(Gould, 1987; Mackey, 2003). This directedness from past
to future is captured by the ‘‘arrow of time’’ metaphor.
Although its status in physics is not entirely uncontrover-
sial (Price, 1996), it is reflected in some of our basic cogni-
tive processes: The perception of events precedes memories
of these events, and causes precede effects. Typically, the
arrow of time is seen as pointing into the future, and for
any concept based on this notion, FRONT in time would thus
be assigned to the future (alternative views and assign-
ments will be discussed further below).
2.2. Conceptual sources for taxonomies of temporal frames of
reference
Although this review focuses on the spatialization of
time and in particular on the mapping of taxonomies of
spatial frames of reference onto temporal relations, two
other sources for these types of taxonomies also require
attention as they are frequent ingredients for construals
of temporal taxonomies: the distinction of A-series versus
B-series, and the equally popular distinction of the Moving
Ego (ME) versus Moving Time (MT) perspective. The heter-
ogeneity in this field of research basically arises from the
various ways in which these two temporal sources are
combined with each other and with spatial notions.
2.2.1. Descriptions of time: A-series versus B-series
One of the oldest research traditions in the domain of
time goes back to an essay by the philosopher John
McTaggart (1908) on ‘‘The Unreality of Time’’, in which
he identifies two different descriptions of temporal order:
the A-series versus B-series of time (see also Gell, 1992;
Traugott, 1975). Broadly speaking, the A-series description
of events follows from the way in which these events are
ordered, as being in the past, present, or future, relative
to an observer’s subjective now or deictic center. Being
part of an A-series also involves a change of status for each
and every event, which was once in the future, then
becomes present, and will finally drift into the past
(Fig. 1a). The B-series description, on the other hand, simply
refers to the order of events within a sequence, in which
one event precedes (‘‘is earlier than’’) or follows (‘‘is later
than’’) another one, regardless of the point in time from
which this may be observed (Fig. 1b).
This distinction is captured by language in that A-series
descriptions typically include tense, which requires
anchoring in the speaker, and thus are deictic, whereas B-
series descriptions are based on sequencing (expressed
by ‘‘earlier/before’’ and ‘‘later/after’’ relations), which
requires an anchoring of events with respect to each other,
and are thus non-deictic (Traugott, 1975, 1978).
2.2.2. Temporal perspectives: Moving Ego (ME) versus Moving
Time (MT)
If we think of time as a river, the direction of flow
allows for two different, yet complementary, perspectives
(see Table 4, left column): the Moving Ego (ME) and the
Moving Time (MT) perspective (e.g., Clark, 1973;
Fillmore, 1971). From the Moving Ego perspective, we
regard ourselves as moving downstream through station-
ary time; we approach future events and leave them
behind, as in (1). From the complementary Moving Time
perspective, we regard ourselves as stationary and time
(a) A-series (b) B-Series
deictic or tensed time non-deictic or sequence time
Fig. 1. The A-series versus B-series of time.
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382 347

Table 4
Extending the Moving Ego (ME) and Moving Time (MT) perspective beyond deictic examples (A-series) to include non-deictic examples (B-
series).

Note. Non-deictic MT corresponds to the ‘‘Time-RP’’ metaphor (proposed by Núñez et al., 2006); non-deictic ME does not occur in English,
but has been observed in Hausa (Hill, 1978), and in Japanese and Marathi (Shinohara & Pardeshi, 2011); further explanation is given in
the text.

as moving towards us; future events approach us and pass
by, as in (2):
(1) ‘‘We are approaching Tuesday.’’
(2) ‘‘Tuesday is approaching (us).’’
These two perspectives on time can be regarded as met-
aphoric systems which are accessed during information
processing (for overviews, see Gentner, 2001; Núñez &
Sweetser, 2006). Either of these systems suggests one spe-
cific reading of ambiguous phrases like ‘‘moving a meeting
forward’’ (Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976), priming either the
ME or MT perspective shifts these readings more towards
the future or the past, and switching from one system to
the other incurs cognitive costs, as revealed by reaction
time in consistent versus inconsistent mapping conditions
(Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner et al., 2002; McGlone &
Harding, 1998).
ME and MT are simply two different perspectives on the
exact same scene—mirror images or figure/ground reversals
of each other (Talmy, 2000; Traugott, 1978): In (1), for
instance, the figure (i.e., the entity to be located) is ‘‘we’’,
and the ground (the entity in reference to which the figure
is located) is Tuesday; in (2), it is the other way around.
In their original version, the scenes depicted in a phrase
like ‘‘moving forward next Wednesday’s meeting’’ involved
a deictic center or Ego (implied in ‘‘next Wednesday’’), but
the complementary relation of ME and MT also holds for
non-deictic scenes (Bender et al., 2010). Consider the
slightly rephrased non-deictic expression ‘‘moving forward
every Wednesday’s meeting’’: The perspective of time as
moving from the future to the past (MT) would still suggest
a pastwards reading, whereas the inverse perspective of
[ME]
temporal entities as moving from the past to the future
[MT]
(ME) would suggest a futurewards reading, as illustrated
in the right-hand column of Table 4. Accordingly, non-
deictic sentences like (3) will also count as MT:
(3) ‘‘Monday comes before Tuesday.’’ [MT]
In this case, the metaphorical motion of events—
triggered by their alignment in a sequence, in which ear-
lier events are ‘‘in front of’’ later ones—resembles the
moving time perspective from future to past. This raises
the question of whether such (non-deictic) B-series
descriptions could also be compatible with the reverse
ME perspective. While the label ‘‘Moving Ego’’ may make
this sound odd, there is actually no reason why it should
be impossible or even implausible. The lack of evidence
from linguistic examples in English alone does not suffice
to assess such a claim. Although seemingly not a domi-
nant phenomenon across languages, at least one condi-
tion is conceivable under which B-series descriptions
would indeed be compatible with an ME perspective:
When sequences of events are described with later events
being ‘‘in front of’’ earlier ones, their alignment reflects
the futurewards direction, which is otherwise characteris-
tic of the ME perspective, as in (4), taken from Hill (1978,
p. 536; and see Levinson & Majid, 2013; Shinohara &
Pardeshi, 2011):
348 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
(4) ‘‘Tuesday is before Monday.’’ [MT]
In any case, the relationship between the ME and MT
perspective on the one hand, and A- and B-series on
the other, cannot be straightforward. While ME and MT
are mirror images of each other (i.e., complementary
perspectives on the same scene), A- and B-series are not;
in fact, they are incommensurable with each other
(McTaggart, 1908; Traugott, 1975, 1978). As we will see
below, one of the reasons why the different accounts differ
so much is because they define ME and MT perspectives
differently (as being strictly deictic or not), and because
they map them differently onto A- and B-series
descriptions.
2.2.3. Spatial frames of reference (s-FoR)
The theoretical construct of prime interest for this
review is frames of reference, which were first designed
Fig. 2. Spatial frames of reference, s-FoR (adapted from Bender et al., 2010).
for space. Over the years, several different taxonomies
have been proposed, with the taxonomy by Levinson
(2003) being one of the most popular. It will be taken here
as the reference point because it has served as the basis for
assessing cross-linguistic variability in spatial references,
and because it was employed as one of the conceptual
sources in most recent attempts of space–time mappings
(for alternative accounts, see also Bohnemeyer &
O’Meara, 2012; Danziger, 2010; Talmy, 2000).
In general, a frame of reference (FoR) is a coordinate
system required to establish the position of a figure in
reference to a ground from a given perspective (Talmy,
2000); sometimes, albeit not necessarily, this perspective
coincides with the viewpoint of an observer. The taxonomy
proposed by Levinson (2003) distinguishes three basic
types: an absolute, an intrinsic, and three variants of a rela-
tive FoR, most of which are depicted in Fig. 2 (for detailed
descriptions, see Bender et al., 2010, 2012; Levinson, 2003).
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
The characterization of these FoRs requires the following
components: a figure F (the object to be located), the
ground object G (in reference to which F is located), and
the origo and orientation of the coordinate system X. The
viewpoint of the observer V is optional and relevant for
the relative FoR only.
The absolute FoR derives its orientation from a superor-
dinate field outside F and G. As argued above (Table 2; and
see Galton, 2011), space generally lacks directionality and
asymmetry, even on Earth (and especially if one leaves
aside the vertical dimension that, by virtue of gravitation,
may be seen as ‘naturally’ directed). Assignment of
orientation to the superordinate field therefore depends
on cultural conventions and includes, for instance, the car-
dinal points, mountain slopes, prevailing wind directions,
rivers, or the land-sea axis on small islands (Bennardo,
2000, 2002; Levinson, 2003; Senft, 1997). Importantly,
neither the position of a potential observer nor the
orientation of G is relevant for referencing. The cat
in Fig. 2a would therefore be described as ‘‘east of the
car’’.2
The intrinsic FoR derives its orientation from the ground
entity G and can thus only be adopted if G is perceived as
being directed. Although a large number of potential
ground entities are asymmetric, this does not necessarily
imply directionality. Assignment of orientation to such an
entity therefore, again, depends on cultural conventions.
In the case of animates this is typically based on looking
direction; but even artifacts such as cars, computers, or
chairs can be assigned a FRONT, depending, for instance, on
how people normally interact with them or into which
direction they tend to move (e.g., Bennardo, 2000; Clark,
1973). Crucially, this includes an observer, as long as this
observer serves as the (primary) ground. The cat in
Fig. 2b could therefore also be described as ‘‘in front of
the car’’. The fact that a particular object may have an
intrinsic orientation, however, only allows for, but does
not determine, the choice of an intrinsic FoR. Again, the
position of a potential observer, if different from G, is irrel-
evant when choosing an intrinsic FoR.
The relative FoRs derive their orientation from the view-
point V of an observer, which needs to be different from the
ground object G to establish the ternary relation between F,
G, and V that is constitutive of a relative FoR (Fig. 2c). As the
position of F is still determined in reference to G, however,
the primary coordinate system with origo X in V needs to be
transferred into G. This secondary coordinate system
(anchored in G = X2) can be established in three different
ways, thus giving rise to the three variants of the relative
FoR: by rotation, reflection, or translation. Of these three
variants, reflection and rotation can only be distinguished
in two-dimensional space; in one-dimensional space (or
time, for that matter), they conflate and will thus be treated
jointly as the reflection variant (Fig. 2d).
These different construals have several implications,
one of which is crucial for the mapping of spatial FoRs to
2
In Talmy’s (2000) account, the alignment of entities (e.g., in a queue)
can provide directness and thus create orientation for an absolute FoR. This
version of an absolute FoR is picked up by some scholars when construing
temporal FoRs.
349
the domain of time. With the reflection variant of the
relative FoR (Fig. 2d), FRONT is assigned to a position
between G and V or nearer to V, and BACK is assigned to a
position beyond G or further away from V. With the
translation variant of the relative FoR (Fig. 2e), the reverse
is true. Please note that the relative FoRs correspond to
the half-axes radiating out from a central point, identified
by Galton (2011) as one possibility for mapping the
directionality property of time to space. This gives rise to
an asymmetry along the TOWARDS/AWAYWARDS dimension
(see Table 2), with the reflection variant favoring the
TOWARDS direction, and the translation variant favoring the
AWAYWARDS direction.
Most of the previous work on spatial FoRs has been con-
cerned with documenting culture-specific preferences for
specific FoRs (e.g., Bennardo, 2002; Haun et al., 2006,
2011; Hüther, Bentz, Spada, Bender, & Beller, 2013;
Levinson, 2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Majid et al.,
2004; Senft, 1997), and with exploring whether differences
in these preferences also entail cognitive implications
(Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch, 2002; versus Li &
Gleitman, 2002; and see Haun et al., 2011; Li, Abarbanell,
Papafragou, & Gleitman, 2011). In this review, we will focus
on the question of whether preferences for a specific FoR in
spatial contexts may carry over to the temporal domain. A
conclusive answer to this question, however, requires a
conclusive mapping of spatial FoRs onto time. The premises
for such a mapping are given: Establishing the position of a
figure in reference to a ground from a given perspective
requires a frame of reference, in time as much as in space.
And although space and time differ in various ways
(Galton, 2011), the principles on which Levinson’s (2003)
taxonomy is based are domain-general, as outlined above,
and can therefore be applied equally well to both domains,
as we aim to demonstrate in the remainder of this paper.
2.2.4. Other conceptual sources: route perspective versus
survey perspective
For the sake of completeness it should be noted that
temporal perspectives have also been related to the litera-
ture on mental maps and spatial navigation. Jamalian and
Tversky (2012), for instance, consider both the ME and
MT perspective as analogous to a route (or intrinsic or ego-
centric) perspective in space, taken from an embedded
viewpoint and with Ego as the reference point. In contrast,
a calendar view on time is seen as analogous to a survey (or
absolute) perspective on space, taken from an external
viewpoint and with dates or events as the reference points.
This account is too recent to have inspired much research
yet, but should be kept in mind.
3. Accounts for mapping spatial frames of reference
onto time
For just one decade now, attempts have been under-
taken to map a taxonomy of spatial frames of reference
(s-FoR) to the domain of time, and these attempts already
encompass more than half a dozen different variants. In
this review, the following accounts will be considered:
350 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
 the Ego-based vs. field-based frames of reference
account by Moore (2004, 2006, 2011);
 the reference-point (RP) metaphors account by
Núñez and Sweetser (2006);
 the temporal framework models account by Kranjec
(2006);
 the temporal frames of reference account by Zinken
(2010);
 the reference frames of space and time account by
Tenbrink (2011); and
 the temporal frames of reference (t-FoR) account by
Bender, Bennardo, and Beller (2005; see also
Bender et al., 2010).
Two other accounts will be considered merely in
passing:
 the time-referent vs. human-referent distinction by
Yu (2012). and
 the route vs. survey perspective account by Jamalian
and Tversky (2012).
The review will take note only of those aspects that are
relevant to the question under scrutiny, namely how
these accounts make use of, and attempt to integrate, the
conceptual sources for temporal taxonomies, including
A-/B-series, ME/MT perspectives, and frames of reference
(overview in Table 5). For any other detail of these
accounts and for the often elaborate metaphorical
mappings, the reader is advised to consult the respective
articles.
3.1. Ego-based versus field-based frames of reference (Moore)
The account proposed by Moore (2004, 2006) provides
one of the first attempts to combine temporal perspectives
with a frame of reference notion (albeit initially not related
to any of the spatial FoR taxonomies). He takes the dichot-
omy of the ME versus MT perspective as the starting point,
but expands their scope beyond examples of the A-series
by distinguishing the MT perspective further into ‘‘Ego-
centered Moving Time’’ and a non-deictic MT, which are
captured by an Ego-based versus field-based frame of ref-
erence, respectively (Table 5a).
For the Ego-based frame of reference, Ego serves as the
reference point. The Ego-based frame of reference thus
involves a deictic center and in this respect corresponds
to the A-series of time, as in (5):
(5) ‘‘Tuesday is [= (2)] [Ego-based]
approaching (us).’’
In contrast, the field-based frame of reference does not
involve a deictic center; Ego and its subjective present is
optional and irrelevant. Instead, it reflects a SEQUENCE AS POSI-
TION ON A PATH metaphor and corresponds to the B-series
time: What counts for this type of reference is the order
of events within a sequence, as in (6):
(6) ‘‘Monday comes [= (3)] [field-based]
before Tuesday.’’
Recently, Moore (2011) further specified this account in
various ways: by categorizing ME and the Ego-centered MT
perspectives together as ‘‘Ego-perspective (path-config-
ured) frames of reference’’, by now explicitly relating his
terms to the A-series (= Ego-perspective) and B-series (=
field-based), and by discussing possible relationships with
the spatial FoRs in Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy (Table 5b).
On the latter issue of mapping spatial FoRs to the temporal
domain, however, he remains rather critical: While the
field-based frame of reference is taken as including the
absolute FoR, the Ego-perspective frame of reference is
claimed to be without counterpart and, more specifically,
to be explicitly not equivalent either to the relative or the
intrinsic FoR (Moore, 2011). This revised account is also
discernibly closer to the account described in the next
section.
3.2. Reference-point (RP) metaphors (Núñez)
A second attempt to go beyond temporal perspectives
and to integrate them with referencing systems is the ref-
erence-point (RP) metaphors account proposed by Núñez
and Sweetser (2006; and see Núñez, Motz, & Teuscher,
2006). In contrast to Moore (2004, 2011), who splits the
MT perspective into two distinct categories, Ego-based ver-
sus field-based, and merges one of these (Ego-based) with
the ME perspective as deictic, Núñez’ account classifies ME
and MT as two sub-cases of what they call the ‘‘Ego-Refer-
ence-Point (Ego-RP) metaphor’’, because they consider
both ME and MT as typically involving an Ego. The Ego-
RP metaphor is set apart from a ‘‘Time-Reference-Point
(Time-RP) metaphor’’ that does not presuppose Ego
(Table 5c).
Examples like (5) and (7) are thus categorized as
instances of Ego-RP metaphors because they make use of
Ego (or rather its subjective now) as the reference point.
Examples like (8) are categorized as instances of Time-RP
metaphors because they depict sequences of events and
use one of these events (here Tuesday) as the reference
point.
(7) ‘‘June is still ahead [Ego-RP]
[of me].’’
(8) ‘‘Monday comes [= (6)] [Time-RP]
before Tuesday.’’
In this sense, the Ego-RP metaphor directly corresponds
to an A-series description, and the Time-RP metaphor to a
B-Series description, even though this is not explicitly sta-
ted by Núñez and Sweetser (2006). The main difference
between this account and the one proposed by Moore is
thus related to how strictly each defines the scope of the
ME and MT perspectives: as being restricted to deictic
(A-series) descriptions, or as reaching further to include
non-deictic (B-series) descriptions (see discussion above
and Section 2.2.2).
Núñez and Sweetser (2006) do not explicitly refer their
account to any taxonomy of spatial FoRs either. What they
do point out, though, is a correspondence between the
Time-RP metaphor and Evans’ (2003) complex temporal
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382 351

Table 5
Schematic overview of the temporal accounts using frames of reference (FoR).

Note. The terms characteristic for each account are printed bold-faced; correspondence with relevant terms that are not explicated but can
be inferred are printed grey and in square brackets; metaphors are in capital letters; and correspondence to Levinson’s (2003) FoRs are
shaded. Further explanation is given in the text.
352 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
sequence model; in addition, they characterize the temporal
relationships in the Time-RP metaphor as ‘‘intrinsic’’ to the
sequence (Núñez et al., 2006, Footnote 1), with earlier
events being described as ‘‘in front of’’ later events. These
two statements encourage us to (tentatively) classify the
Time-RP metaphor as an instance of the intrinsic FoR. This
would also be compatible with how they derive the intrin-
sic FRONT of G in the Time-RP metaphor, namely from the
prototypical direction of motion (i.e., pastwards; Fig. 1b).
In contrast, the Ego-RP metaphor, for which they assign
Ego the decisive role, might be seen as corresponding to
a relative FoR.
3.3. Temporal framework models (Kranjec)
Following on from this classification, Kranjec (2006)
proposes a temporal framework models account, with which
he tries to integrate the reference point metaphors with
the A- and B-series of time and with all three spatial FoRs
from Levinson’s (2003) account. His taxonomy encom-
passes a deictic temporal framework (which comes close
to what Levinson labels ‘‘relative’’), an intrinsic, and an
extrinsic framework or ‘‘absolute’’ FoR in Levinson’s termi-
nology (in more recent work, the intrinsic and extrinsic
temporal framework were relabeled as ‘‘linked’’ and
‘‘path’’, respectively; see Kranjec & McDonough, 2011).
The deictic temporal framework covers the A-series type
of events, subsumes the ME and MT perspectives, and is
thus equivalent to the Ego-RP metaphor proposed by
Núñez and Sweetser (2006). The classical non-deictic cases
(B-series), which basically rely on the earlier/later relation
within temporal sequences, are captured in his account by
the intrinsic temporal framework, akin to Núñez’ Time-RP
metaphor. Finally, the one framework that is newly consid-
ered here, the extrinsic temporal framework, is based on
the notion of ‘‘time itself’’ (referred to as the ‘‘matrix sense’’
of time by Evans, 2003). According to this notion, time is ‘‘a
backdrop, or something understood to move forward, inde-
pendent of particular events embedded within it’’ (Kranjec,
2006, p. 450), and its direction eventually affords assign-
ment of FRONT to the future (Table 5d).
3.4. Temporal frames of reference (Zinken)
Similar to the previous account, Zinken (2010) takes the
A-/B-series conception as his starting point and tries to
integrate it with Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy of spatial
FoRs. He equates an A-series classification with Moore’s
Ego-based frame and Núñez’ Ego-RP metaphor. Both tem-
poral perspectives, ME and MT, are considered to be sub-
cases of this category (which reveals the stricter reading
of the temporal perspectives; Section 2.2.2). Conversely, a
B-series classification is equated with Moore’s field-based
frame and Núñez’ time-RP metaphor, except that this does
not entail the MT perspective (Table 5e). The integration
with spatial FoRs is based on whether the relations
involved are binary or ternary (Fig. 2) and on an analysis
of how FRONT is assigned in each of these cases.
A-series time always involves an Ego, and is thus a nec-
essary precondition for ternary relations (which are a nec-
essary precondition for the relative FoR). However, it is not
a sufficient precondition for ternary relations: If Ego serves
as the ground entity G for the reference, the relation is bin-
ary (as explained in Section 2.2.3) and thus only affords an
intrinsic FoR. A-series descriptions may therefore entail an
intrinsic FoR as in (9)
(9) ‘‘I have a fun afternoon in front of me.’’ [intrinsic]
(binary, with F = afternoon and
G = me/Ego),
or a relative FoR as in (10)
(10) ‘‘the day after tomorrow’’ [relative]
(ternary, with F = the day,
G = tomorrow, and V = today/Ego’s
now).
As Ego is constitutive of A-series descriptions, Ego’s
looking direction is taken as the source for assigning FRONT
to the future. This holds both for the intrinsic example in
(9) and the relative example in (10); however, in the latter
case, FRONT is constrained to that part of Ego’s future which
is also in G’s past (which is why the day after tomorrow,
and thus in G’s future, is also in G’s back).
In B-series time, Ego is irrelevant; therefore, both an
intrinsic and an absolute FoR are, in principle, possible.
However, in contrast to binary relations in A-series time,
where the intrinsic FoR is warranted by Ego and its intrinsic
FRONT, its adoption in this context requires an additional
assumption. To endow a ground event G with an intrinsic
FRONT, Zinken argues, events need to be regarded as one
‘‘following’’ the other, as in (11):
(11) ‘‘One day comes after the other.’’ [intrinsic]
The direction of movement can thus be used to assign
FRONT—here: to the earlier or anterior event (Zinken,
2010; and see Fillmore, 1971).
The absolute FoR, on the other hand, requires that the
origo of the coordinate system is not located in the ground
entity G, but in the surrounding field. According to Zinken
(2010), temporal intervals (such as days or weeks) can be
understood as such bounded entities or ‘fields’, with the
beginning of the interval (in the past) corresponding to
the field’s FRONT, and with earlier events as being closer to
this FRONT. For this very reason, he classifies (12)—different
from (11)—as an example of an absolute FoR:
(12) ‘‘Wednesday is after Tuesday.’’ [absolute]
In a more recent paper (Sinha et al., 2011), Zinken’s
account has been somewhat modified. Here, the terms
absolute, intrinsic, and relative are no longer used; instead,
ME and MT are classified as ‘‘Ego-relative temporal motion
constructions’’, and sequence-based ones as ‘‘positional
time constructions’’, which is equated with Moore’s
(2011) field-based temporal FoR and McTaggart’s (1908)
B-series (Table 5e0 ). It is unclear whether this shift in ter-
minology is intended as a conceptual advancement. How-
ever, as Zinken himself argued in his earlier paper, such a
bipartite classification would be less powerful than his ori-
ginal tripartite FoR system.
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
3.5. Reference frames of space and time (Tenbrink)
For her account, which aims to provide a cross-domain
framework, Tenbrink (2011) directly builds on Levinson’s
(2003) taxonomy and expands it by adding dynamic rela-
tions to the static ones, and by transferring the resulting
system from space to time. Her reference frames are
modeled along the following lines: (a) intrinsic, relative,
and absolute concepts (or none of these), (b) static versus
dynamic situations, and (c) external versus internal rela-
tionships between entities (in space only). Based on these
distinctions, she describes 23 different reference frames
for space and 10 for time. Leaving aside the external/
internal distinction, we will focus in this review on her
absolute, intrinsic, and relative FoR for static situations,
but will also, where necessary, pay special attention to
dynamic situations.
The transfer of Tenbrink’s spatial taxonomy to time
additionally makes use of the A- and B-series and their
mapping onto ME and MT perspectives. Following
Galton (2011), she describes time as having an ‘‘inbuilt
asymmetry’’, which, however, can be conceived of in
two contrasting ways: as a vector from past to future
(associated with the deictic A-series), and as a vector
based on anteriority/posteriority in sequences (associated
with the non-deictic B-series), which points towards
earlier times (Table 5f).
In line with Moore (2006, 2011), the B-series in her
account corresponds to the Ego-free MT and thus to a
field-based frame of reference; and the anteriority/posteri-
ority relation within sequences of events is seen as war-
ranting its classification as absolute FoR (it cannot be
intrinsic as events do not have an intrinsic FRONT according
to Tenbrink, 2011). Her treatment of the A-series, however,
diverges from Moore (2004, 2011) insofar as she does not
explicitly account for Ego-centered MT as instance of refer-
ence frames. Instead, she considers a distinction of static
versus dynamic situations as more important.
The static A-series situations in her account all have a
binary structure, with G = Ego (as in (13)), thus affording
an intrinsic FoR (see also Zinken, 2010).
(13) ‘‘Good times lie before me.’’ [intrinsic]
FRONT is assigned in line with Ego’s looking direction and
thus typically to the future. According to Tenbrink (2011),
ternary relations do not exist in temporal language for sta-
tic situations, and therefore no relative FoR exists either. In
contrast, the dynamic situations in her account afford more
than one FoR. Respective cases include binary relations as
in (14), which are classified as intrinsic (again with
G = Ego), and ternary relations as in (15).
(14) ‘‘I’m going forward in time.’’ [intrinsic]
(15) ‘‘Next Wednesday’s meeting has
been moved forward two days.’’
At least in English, example (15) constitutes an ambig-
uous case, in which the meeting may be understood as
having been moved towards Friday (futurewards) or Mon-
day (pastwards). Both readings are classified by Tenbrink
(2011) as being based on a relative FoR: the futurewards
reading as resulting from an ME perspective and the
353
pastwards reading as resulting from an MT perspective.
From the ME perspective, assignment of FRONT is derived
from Ego’s moving direction into the future. From the com-
plementary MT perspective, the event is seen as being
moved into Ego’s FRONT area. The same reading (pastwards
to Monday) could also arise from an absolute FoR, accord-
ing to which the meeting has been simply moved towards
earlier times, regardless of how it is related to Ego’s now.
3.6. Temporal frames of reference, t-FoR (Bender, Beller, and
Bennardo)
In contrast to most other accounts, Bender and col-
leagues (Bender et al., 2005, 2010, 2012; Rothe-Wulf
et al., 2014; and see Table 5g) do not take the A-/B-series
distinction as their starting point, but rely entirely on the
design principles laid out for frames of reference by Levin-
son (Section 2.2.3). Based on these principles, they propose
a set of possible FoRs (not necessarily attested to by exam-
ples from English) that can be used to explore the extent of
diversity in temporal references.
They define an absolute t-FoR as one that derives its ori-
entation from the superordinate field outside figure,
ground, and observer. As space itself is the superordinate
field in the spatial domain, so is time in the temporal
domain; and the asymmetry of time (i.e., its directionality)
can be recruited for assigning orientation to this field: FRONT
is where the arrow of time is pointing to, namely (typi-
cally) towards the future. Events ‘‘in front of’’ other events
or ‘‘moved forward’’ from their previous position would
thus be further in the future.
An intrinsic FoR derives its orientation from the ground
entity G; and the asymmetry of events (with a beginning
and an end) can be recruited for providing these entities
with orientation: FRONT is assigned to that part of time per-
tinent to the beginning of event G. Events ‘‘in front of’’
other events or ‘‘moved forward’’ from their previous posi-
tion would thus be in the past of the original date. Impor-
tantly, in the t-FoR account, this also holds if Ego happens
to coincide with G, as what counts here as G in time is a
temporal entity such as subjective present, and not Ego’s
looking direction.
A relative FoR, finally, requires a ternary relation
between figure F, ground G, and observer V. How F is local-
ized in reference to G depends on V’s subjective viewpoint,
and this viewpoint can change relative to the constellation
of F and G (e.g., by simply ‘moving’ through time). Cru-
cially, it emerges as either one of two different (and in fact
opposed) variants (Fig. 2): In the reflection variant, the pri-
mary coordinate system originating in V is transferred into
G by reflection and thus leads to the assignment of FRONT to
the time between G and V (i.e., nearer to V), whereas in the
translation variant, the primary coordinate system is trans-
ferred into G by translation, thus leading to the assignment
of FRONT to the time beyond G (i.e., further away from V). In
either case, events are localized symmetrically in one’s
past and future, and thus with diverging FRONTs and BACKs.
Such a relative-reflective (or ‘‘egocentric’’) pattern is nicely
demonstrated, for instance, in the French terms for great-
grandchildren and great-grandparents, which are all
suffixed by arrière, ‘‘behind’’ (Radden, 2004).
354 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
In the t-FoR account, A-series and B-series descriptions
may reflect certain FoRs more or less closely (e.g., a B-ser-
ies description of sequenced events invites an intrinsic
FoR), but are not seen as logically related. In particular,
A-series descriptions do not entail a relative FoR per se. A
genuine relative FoR presupposes that the introduction of
the subjective viewpoint (V) of an observer (which has to
be distinct from G) makes a difference for referencing;
and this is not the case for most A-series descriptions.
For instance, a sentence like (16)
(16) ‘‘Next Wednesday’s meeting [= (15)]
has been moved forward two
days.’’
could still be understood according to the intrinsic FoR in
that ‘‘forward’’ is interpreted as being towards earlier
times, or according to the absolute FoR in that ‘‘forward’’
is interpreted as being simply towards the future.
Likewise, the ME and MT perspective in the more gen-
eral reading (Section 2.2.2) largely reflect different tempo-
ral FoRs, with ME reflecting the futurewards orientation
aligned to the arrow of time (absolute FoR) and MT reflect-
ing the pastwards orientation, towards the beginning of
time (intrinsic FoR). However, they do not necessarily
always correlate with them: From both perspectives,
future is where the arrow of time is pointing to (absolute),
the beginning of events occurs earlier than their endings
(intrinsic), and Ego and future are approaching each other
(relative). The assignment of FRONT, arguably the hallmark
of a frame of reference, is not fully affected by the adoption
of a temporal perspective (except for ambiguous cases like
(16), the reading of which may indeed be primed by move-
ment; see Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002).
3.7. Further accounts
For the sake of completeness, two more accounts will be
briefly presented despite the fact that they are not yet
widely disseminated: the temporal reference frames
account by Yu (2012), and the route versus survey perspec-
tives account by Jamalian and Tversky (2012).
3.7.1. Temporal reference frames (Yu)
In order to resolve the controversy regarding whether,
in Chinese, Ego is conceived of as facing toward the future
or the past, Yu (2012) proposes two distinctions. The first
Table 6
The four temporal reference frames distinguished by Yu (2012).
Note. A-series and B-series labels were added here for easier comparison.
distinction concerns the reference point RP, which in other
taxonomies (and in this review) is denominated as ground
entity G. Following Moore (2011) and Núñez and Sweetser
(2006), the two categories are labeled Ego-RP and Time-RP
(Yu, 2012). The second—and novel—distinction concerns
the referent R (or figure entity F), with time-referent
(Time-R) and human-referent (Human-R) as the two cate-
gories relevant for Chinese (Yu, 2012; and see Table 6).
The latter category consists of human sequences (either
as ‘‘deictic human frame’’ or ‘‘sequential human frame’’),
which are analogous to event sequences and thus map
onto an earlier/later relation, with older people and gener-
ations ‘‘in front of’’ the sequence and/or Ego.
The A-/B-series distinction is mentioned in passing as
being related (and presumably overlapping with the RP
distinction). ME and MT are mainly used for assigning
FRONT to temporal entities and/or relations. Yu’s account
largely remains silent regarding a possible correspondence
with (spatial) FoRs, leaning more towards Talmy’s (2000)
than Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy, specifically when it
comes to assigning FRONT in queue-like compositions such
as event sequences. Such compositions are seen as
‘‘encompassive secondary reference objects’’ (Talmy,
2000; and see Moore, 2011). Their FRONT is derived from
alignment and/or moving direction and overrides the (pos-
sible) orientation of single entities. In contrast to many
other scholars, but in line with Bender and colleagues
and partly Zinken (2010), this account also grants an
intrinsic FRONT to times and events (Yu, 2012).
3.7.2. Route perspective versus survey perspective (Jamalian
and Tversky)
In contrast to the aforementioned account that relates
to spatial FoRs only in passing, the account proposed by
Jamalian and Tversky (2012) is not as elaborate with
regard to temporal concepts as the previous ones. Coming
from the research tradition in mental maps and spatial
navigation, these authors focus on the distinction between
route perspective versus survey perspective, which they
equate with an intrinsic or egocentric FoR and an absolute
FoR, respectively. The route perspective in space is consid-
ered to be analogous to both the ME and MT perspective in
time, taken from an embedded viewpoint and with Ego as
the reference point. In contrast, the survey perspective on
space is considered to be analogous to a calendar view
on time, taken from an external viewpoint and with dates
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
or events as the reference points (see also Núñez &
Sweetser, 2006; Zinken, 2010).
4. Comparison of accounts
As we have seen above, most accounts make use of the
same set of conceptual components for construing tempo-
ral FoRs (which is partly obscured by idiosyncratic label-
ing), but combine them in distinct ways. As one
consequence, each of the accounts proposed so far differs
in substantial ways from any other account. In this section,
we attempt to analyze similarities and differences between
the accounts by addressing the following questions: (1)
How are the conceptual sources related to each other for
the construal of temporal FoRs? (2) On which principles
is FoR construal based, and how is FRONT assignment real-
ized in this process? And (3) what types of relations or ref-
erencing patterns are predicted from each of these
taxonomies? In closing this section, we also explore (4)
the potential for integrating these accounts.
4.1. Relations between conceptual sources
The conceptual sources to be considered here encom-
pass A- and B-series, the Moving Ego (ME) and Moving
Time (MT) perspective, and up to four frames of reference
(FoRs).
4.1.1. Relations between A-/B-series and temporal FoRs
Almost all of the accounts presented here (except for the
one by Bender et al., 2010) take deixis, in any one of its con-
ceptual variants (e.g., A-/B-series, Ego-/field-based, Ego/
time reference point), as their starting point. In other words,
the basic distinction from which most taxonomies unfold is
the distinction between linguistic expressions that do or do
not entail a deictic center: Ego, or rather Ego’s present. This
is certainly attributable to the fact that most of these
accounts originate from linguistics, and it accommodates
the relevance of deixis, particularly for the relative FoR,
which does indeed require the viewpoint V of an observer.
Taking deictic versus non-deictic expressions as the prime
distinction, however, may obscure the fact that the relations
between the A-/B-series classification on the one hand and a
FoR-based classification on the other are more complex
(Section 2.2.2; and see Levinson, 2003; Moore, 2011). Binary
relations in which Ego (or V) serves as the primary reference
point (= ground G), such as (9) or (13) above, attest to this
complexity as much as a ternary example like (15). The bin-
ary relations with G = V do not qualify as examples of a rel-
ative FoR (Tenbrink, 2011; Zinken, 2010), whereas a ternary
example like (15), despite clearly qualifying as an A-series
description, could also be interpreted in line with an abso-
lute FoR (Bender et al., 2010; Tenbrink, 2011). Undoubtedly,
however, the A-/B-series distinction helps to avoid confu-
sion between past and future on the one hand and earlier
and later on the other.
4.1.2. Relations between ME/MT perspectives and A-/B-series
Whereas A- and B-series are incommensurable with each
other, ME and MT provide complementary perspectives on
355
the exact same scene. As detailed in Section 2.2.2, this sim-
ple fact implies that the two distinctions address different
dimensions of temporal descriptions and, as a consequence,
cannot be mapped onto each other in any straightforward
manner.
Some accounts (e.g., Kranjec, 2006; Núñez & Sweetser,
2006; Zinken, 2010) conceptualize both ME and MT as
involving a deictic center (Ego), as was intended in the
original version (Section 2.2.2), and therefore map them
onto the A-series (Table 5). Other accounts (notably
Moore, 2004, 2011; and see also Tenbrink, 2011) extend
the notion of MT by also including non-deictic cases,
which they then map onto the B-series. As argued by
Bender et al. (2010), such an extension presupposes a
more general view on temporal moving perspectives,
namely as a perspective on time as moving not only
towards Ego but towards temporal entities and events
more generally. Since ME and MT are figure/ground rever-
sals of each other, this must entail the possibility of the
reversed perspective: a non-deictic ME perspective
according to which not only Ego, but temporal entities
and events more generally are (figuratively) moving
through time (in this case, of course, the perspective
should be labeled ‘‘moving event’’ or ‘‘moving entity’’,
rather than ‘‘moving Ego’’). In (16), for instance, the meet-
ing moves towards the future; the same is possible (in
both directions) for other events such as floating holidays
and vacations. As proposed in the account by Bender,
Beller, and Bennardo (2010; and see Table 4 above), the
ME/MT distinction would thus fully intersect the A-/B-ser-
ies distinction, at least in theory. Whether this theoretical
claim can be corroborated by empirical evidence remains
to be seen.
4.1.3. Relations between ME/MT perspectives and temporal
FoRs
Those accounts that conceptualize ME and MT in the
stricter sense as involving a deictic center also tend to
equate both perspectives with a relative FoR (Kranjec,
2006; and by inference perhaps Núñez & Sweetser,
2006). The same holds for Zinken’s (2010) account, albeit
with the relative FoR being restricted to ternary relations.
Accounts that also admit non-deictic MT cases (Moore,
2004, 2011; Tenbrink, 2011) match them to an absolute
FoR (Table 5). The account by Bender et al. (2010) diverges
from all of these accounts in various ways. Due to diverg-
ing design principles, it proposes cases that do or do not
involve Ego for both the ME and MT perspective, and it
refuses to conflate the two complementary perspectives
under one FoR. As a consequence, non-deictic MT is seen
as being compatible with an intrinsic FoR, and non-deictic
ME as being compatible with an absolute FoR. In contrast,
the two variants of the relative FoR do not comply, in this
account, with any general moving perspective.
4.1.4. Distinction between static and dynamic situations
Tenbrink (2011) argues that a comprehensive taxonomy
of temporal FoRs should include the distinction between
static and dynamic situations (Section 3.5), and as we will
see from the empirical data compiled below, this may
indeed be important in some cases. With regard to her clas-
356 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
Table 7
Assignment of FRONT depending on the adopted t-FoR, together with the principles on which this is based, in each of the accounts; further explanation is given in
the text.
sification of FoRs, however, it only has a bearing on her con-
ceptualization of relative FoRs, which are claimed to exist in
dynamic but not static situations. Why this should be valid
is an interesting question in itself (for counter-examples,
see Levinson & Majid, 2013; Radden, 2004; Shinohara &
Pardeshi, 2011; Zinken, 2010), but in either case, this
restriction entitles us to collapse our review across static
and dynamic situations for all other FoRs.
4.2. Principles of FoR construal and FRONT assignment
As explained in Section 2.2.3, a frame of reference (FoR)
is a coordinate system required to establish the position of
a figure F in reference to a ground G from a given perspec-
tive (which may or may not be an observer V). The FoRs
differ essentially in terms of where this coordinate system
originates and how it is oriented. The system’s origo may
be in the superordinate field (in the case of the absolute
FoR), in G (intrinsic), or in V (relative) and is used to estab-
lish its orientation. With regard to these design principles,
spatial frames of reference (s-FoRs) do not differ from tem-
poral frames of reference (t-FoRs).3
4.2.1. Absolute t-FoR
The construal of an absolute FoR requires an oriented
superordinate field outside F, G, and V. In the spatial domain,
this field is space, and in the temporal domain, by analogy, it
is time. But while the relevance of such an oriented field is
3
It should be noted, though, that not all accounts reviewed here are
based on these principles (see specifically Moore, 2011).
undisputed, there is no consensus on where this orientation
may come from. In the accounts reviewed here, at least three
different principles can be identified for how orientation of
the temporal field is conceptualized (see Table 7).
In line with causal relations and the change from per-
ception to memory, the arrow of time as conceptualized
by most physicists and psychologists points towards the
future (Section 2.1.3). This notion is enlisted by Kranjec
(2006) and Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010) to identify
the orientation of the field as futurewards. In at least two
other accounts (Tenbrink, 2011; and, albeit with reserva-
tions, Moore, 2011), this same arrow of time is regarded
as emerging from the viewpoint of Ego, who happens to
be aligned to the future, thus connecting it to an intrinsic
FoR. For construing an absolute FoR, these accounts take
instead the earlier/later (anteriority/posteriority) relation,
inherent in the sequence of events (akin to people in a
queue), as the source from which they derive the orienta-
tion of the field. According to these accounts, the absolute
field is therefore oriented pastwards or, more precisely,
towards earlier events.4 Finally, Zinken (2010) also consid-
ers the absolute field as being oriented towards earlier
4
The same seems to hold for Jamalian and Tversky (2012), who equate
the absolute FoR with a calendar view on time, with dates or events as the
reference points and ‘‘earlier/later’’ as the terms of reference. However, this
account leaves open whether the field is considered to be oriented towards
earlier or later events. Yu (2012) does not specify his account with regard to
a FoR taxonomy, but as he leans on Talmy’s (2000) treatment of queue-like
compositions in a way similar to Moore (2011), we categorize him into this
group by analogy. Crucially, in his account, not only sequences of events are
referenced absolutely, but also sequences of human generations.
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382 357

times, but for a different reason. In his account, the field, in
which single events are embedded, consists of larger tem-
poral entities—intervals like days, weeks, months, or years.
The beginning of these intervals is assumed to be their
FRONT, and this has always taken place in the past of the
embedded events.
4.2.2. Intrinsic t-FoR
The intrinsic FoR usually attracts little dispute, even
with regard to denomination. For it to be enacted, the
ground object G (or reference point) that serves as origo
of the system needs to have an orientation assigned to it.
Amazingly, however, in the temporal domain, little con-
sensus can be observed across the different accounts
regarding what would count as an intrinsic orientation—
or whether G, if it is an event, may have one at all (see
Table 7).
Tenbrink (2011), for instance, claims that this is impos-
sible (and see Zinken, 2010). For this very reason, the two
accounts only consider cases in which the observer V coin-
cides with the ground (G = Ego) as examples of an intrinsic
FoR. Derived from the assumed looking or moving direc-
tion of Ego (prevailingly futurewards), FRONT is assigned to
the future5 (in Zinken’s account only for A-series descrip-
tions). In contrast, three accounts propose the opposite
assignment of FRONT to earlier times, although for different
reasons: Zinken (2010, for B-series phrases) and Kranjec
(2006)—as well as, perhaps, Núñez and Sweetser (2006)—
due to the metaphorical moving direction of G, derived from
the earlier/later relation in event sequences; and Bender and
colleagues (2005, 2010) due to what they hold to be an
intrinsic FRONT of events (the latter assumption is also shared
by Yu, 2012).
with a distinct and unambiguous assignment pattern:
nearer to Ego for the reflection, and further away from
Ego for the translation variant. This conception is in line
with Galton’s (2011) notion of radial half-axes, and it also
conforms with early theoretical considerations put forward
by Traugott (1975, 1978), who defined tense, in its sim-
plest form, as the distinction between proximal and distal
relations, and thus as symmetrical to the deictic center.
4.3. Referencing patterns
As a consequence of the different conceptualizations
and principles for assigning FRONT, the accounts reviewed
here also make qualitatively distinct predictions with
regard to the number and type of the resultant referencing
patterns (see Table 8).
4.3.1. Two patterns
The early accounts of A-series versus B-series (following
McTaggart, 1908) as well as the approaches that build on
the ME versus MT perspective on time (Clark, 1973;
Fillmore, 1971; and see, e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002;
Gentner et al., 2002; McGlone & Harding, 1998) basically
distinguish two patterns of assigning FRONT, namely either
futurewards (A-series, ME perspective) or pastwards/
towards earlier events (B-series, MT perspective). This pat-
tern is reflected in the accounts of Moore (2004, 2011),
Núñez and Sweetser (2006), and Kranjec (2006)—and this
despite the fact that Moore splits MT into an ego-centered
and a field-based version, and Kranjec even distinguishes
four different cases (extrinsic, intrinsic, and deictic in an
ME versus MT version).

4.3.2. Three patterns

4.2.3. Relative t-FoR
Zinken (2010) and Tenbrink (2011) predict three differ-
To an even greater extent than the intrinsic FoR, the rel-
ent patterns: a simple pattern each for a futurewards
ative FoR seems to open up a wide field for diverging per-
assignment (for A-series, with Ego = G) and a pastwards
spectives and positions. Relative FoRs require a ternary
assignment (for B-series) as well as a more complex
relation, in which Ego (or V) cannot serve as the primary
pattern of assigning FRONT to the space between Ego and a
reference point (or G). But whether they exist in the
ground entity (which is in the future of Ego). In Zinken’s
domain of time, and, if so, in how many variants, remains
(2010) account, this occurs for all cases of A-series, in
disputed (see Table 7).
which Ego is not conflated with G. In Tenbrink’s (2011)
A relative temporal FoR is claimed not to exist at all by
account, it occurs for dynamic situations only, and only
Moore (2011) and not to exist for static situations by
according to one reading of her example (16), in which
Tenbrink (2011). Other accounts do admit its existence.
the entity to be moved is perceived as approaching. While
Zinken (2010), for instance, defines a relative FoR as entail-
these accounts offer a third pattern insofar as they qualify
ing the assignment of FRONT to the future of Ego—due to its
the pastwards movement by fixing it to the future of Ego,
looking direction—but past of or earlier than G (i.e., the
they remain silent on the question of what happens to this
interval between Ego and G). Kranjec (2006) and even
pattern in Ego’s past. It is thus not clear whether assigning
Tenbrink (2011, for dynamic situations) also propose a rel-
FRONT to the past of G (but the future of Ego) is qualitatively
ative FoR, but one that implies two diverging assignments
different from a more general assignment of FRONT to the
of FRONT: towards the future or later times from an ME per-
past and thus from a broader MT perspective, regardless
spective, and towards the past or earlier times from an MT
of Ego’s position.
perspective (see also Jamalian & Tversky, 2012; Núñez &
Sweetser, 2006).
Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010), finally, propose 4.3.3. Four patterns
two relative FoRs, a reflection and a translation one—each In contrast, the account by Bender and colleagues
(2005, 2010) explicitly distinguishes the set of general
5
Arguably, this may also be how one can categorize Yu’s (2012) deictic
movements (pastwards vs. futurewards) from a set of
time frame, which combines Ego-RP with Time-R (thus corresponding to the radial movements (towards Ego/now vs. awaywards from
classical A-series) and is oriented towards the future. Ego/now, both in past and future). This subsumes the
358 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
Table 8
Patterns of FRONT assignment and/or forward movement; explanation is given in the text.
half-linear or half-radial patterns acknowledged by Zinken
(2010) and Tenbrink (2011).
4.4. Potential for integration
As is apparent from the above overview, conceptualiza-
tions differ dramatically for all of the FoRs, and for none is
there convergence among more than half of the accounts.
None of the accounts agrees completely with any of the
other accounts across all FoRs. And even where two
accounts propose the same type of FRONT assignment, this
may be for quite different reasons. Does this situation leave
any leeway for us to decide objectively, which of the prin-
ciples adopted for the construal of the t-FoRs is more sen-
sible than the others?
At first glance, this seems to be unlikely. For instance,
the orientation of the temporal field required for the abso-
lute FoR can be derived from the arrow of time, which
points towards the future, but it can also be derived from
an extensive temporal interval that began in the past, in
‘‘the beginning of all time’’. This is further complicated by
the fact that, for some speech communities like Aymara
(Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), the future is apparently con-
ceived of as being in one’s back, and the past as in front.
However, this apparent arbitrariness in how such a crucial
question could be addressed in fact helps to highlight a
need for further conceptual clarifications related to a spa-
tio-temporal taxonomy of FoRs.
In order to settle the theoretical disputes, we propose a
taxonomy entirely based on abstract design principles. FoR
construal according to this taxonomy depends on the num-
ber of entities for which the relation has to be established
(binary or ternary) and on the origo of the coordinate sys-
tem (in the superordinate field, the ground entity G, or the
observer’s viewpoint V). While this is largely consensual
across the accounts reviewed here, the current proposal
differs from these accounts in how it treats linguistic
examples: For an intrinsic FoR to be diagnosed, it cannot
be decisive whether, for instance, Wednesday’s meeting
is moved forward into the past, but whether the alignment
of FORWARD with past is derived from the ground (Wednes-
day), rather than from the field (time in general) or the
observer’s viewpoint (now).
Like its counterpart in space, this taxonomy constitutes
a tool for assessing a broad range of possible references in
time. However, it remains abstract insofar as it contains at
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
least one free parameter, namely the principle according to
which orientation is assigned to the entity that serves as
origo for the coordinate system—in each of the FoRs under
scrutiny here, albeit to varying degrees. How orientation is
concretely assigned depends almost entirely on cultural
conventions and may thus vary across and perhaps even
within speech communities. If two speakers diverge in
how they assign orientation to origo, an apparently identi-
cal expression would be generated by diverging FoRs,
whereas adoption of the same FoR would generate diverg-
ing expressions. More specifically, the alignment of FORWARD
with past could be indicative of an absolute FoR (if time is
seen as having its beginning in the past), or of an intrinsic
FoR (if events are seen as being oriented by their begin-
ning, or if events are seen as moving into the past).
In not presupposing a specific alignment, this account
differs substantially from all accounts reviewed above,
and even from the initial t-FoR taxonomy. While Bender
and colleagues (2005, 2010) acknowledged such a free
parameter to be fixed by cultural convention in the case
of the absolute FoR, they did not acknowledge it for the
intrinsic FoR, which they simply equated with pastward
alignment.6 Consequently, the original t-FoR taxonomy fell
short of achieving a clear conceptual separation of the
design principles on the one hand and their (culture-
specific) instantiation on the other.
This conceptual separation, however, is crucial for
tighter integration of the accounts reviewed above. As
indicated in Table 7, most of these accounts already agree
on the relevance of the design principles for FoR construal.
This convergence, however, is partly blurred by four
sources of confusion, three of which can be resolved on
theoretical grounds.
The first source for blurring is the conceptualization of
the relative FoR, which has given rise to the most contro-
versy—from claims that it does not exist at all, to sugges-
tions of one FoR or even two variants of it. This
controversy fizzles out if some of the somewhat under-
specified assumptions regarding the relative FoR are elab-
orated further. Three of the four accounts that do propose
relative FoRs distinguish two different cases that entail
diverging FRONT assignments, namely both to future and
past (Table 7). This in itself is unsatisfactory: The purpose
of adopting a FoR is to locate F in reference to G. Conse-
quently, each FoR should give a non-ambiguous search
space for F. While this does not imply that relations can
be described by only one FoR, it does imply that each FoR
should give only one relation of F to G. Assuming two dis-
tinct variants of the relative t-FoR (akin to the variants of
the relative FoR in space, as described in Section 2.2.3)
solves this problem: The reflection variant of the relative
FoR could encompass the MT cases in the accounts of
6 assigns FRONT in each of the temporal FoRs currently paint
In the case of the relative FoR, the free parameter to be fixed by cultural
conventions defines how the primary coordinate system with origo X in V is
transferred into G. As described in Section 2.2.3, this can be done by
rotation, reflection, or translation, thus giving rise to three variants, which
differ in how the secondary coordinate system (anchored in G = X2) is
oriented. The degree to which speakers may differ in this regard, has been
documented especially for the spatial domain (e.g., Beller et al., 2014;
Bender et al., 2012; Bennardo, 2000; Bennardo, 2009; Hill, 1982) and will
be discussed for the temporal domain in Section 7.3.1.
359
Núñez and Sweetser (2006), Kranjec (2006), and Tenbrink
(2011), with the additional specification that FRONT is
assigned not simply to the past, but to the past of G within
the future of Ego (i.e., to the interval between Ego/V and
G); and the translation variant could encompass the ME
cases in these same accounts, with the additional specifica-
tion that FRONT is assigned not simply to the future, but to
the future of both G and Ego.
A second source for blurring is the question of whether
Ego’s assumed looking or moving direction (into the
future) may serve to assign FRONT in any of the FoRs. As
detailed in Section 4.2.2, some accounts (Tenbrink, 2011;
Zinken, 2010) consider binary relations with Ego (V) = G
as the only cases in which an intrinsic FoR can be adopted.
In these cases, Ego’s looking direction is seen as providing
the basis for FRONT assignment. ‘‘Ego’’ in time, however, is
only used figuratively as person; in actual fact it is defined
as an event or time point (i.e., Ego’s subjective present), for
which looking direction does not make sense. Rather, Ego’s
looking direction reflects the general view of where time
‘flows’ to, and may thus be used as an indicator for how
orientation of the absolute field is defined in this speech
community (see also Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Yu, 2012).
This concern is related to the third source for blurring,
namely the debate on whether temporal entities and/or
the superordinate field can be regarded as oriented at all.
As mentioned above, some accounts (including Zinken,
2010) claim that events do not have an intrinsic orienta-
tion. If, however, time in general, as well as time intervals
like weeks or days more specifically, may be seen as direc-
ted, thus providing orientation to the field in an absolute
sense (Zinken, 2010; and see Yu, 2012), any event serving
as ground G for the intrinsic FoR—by virtue of having a
beginning in the exact same way—should also be seen as
directed. This is what actually allows the sequence of
events in B-series descriptions to be depicted by a vector
pointing towards earlier times.
The final source for blurring is the disagreement among
accounts on what provides the basis for FRONT assignment
in binary temporal relations, with some scholars recruiting
the same principle (e.g., the sequence of events) for justify-
ing an absolute FoR that others use to justify an intrinsic
FoR. This disagreement cannot be resolved on theoretical
grounds. As we argued above, the principle according to
which orientation is assigned to the origo for the coordi-
nate system is largely based on conventions. Whether
and how speakers assign FRONT to time and temporal enti-
ties such as events can only be assessed empirically. The
second part of this review therefore scrutinizes the avail-
able empirical data. Based on this analysis, the potential
for a more coherent theoretical integration will then be
discussed anew.
To summarize, while the ways in which each account
a rather confusing picture, it would indeed be possible to
achieve more consensus and coherence: by taking the
design principles for FoR construal as the starting point,
by acknowledging the radial patterns involved in the rela-
tive FoR, by using Ego’s alignment with time (its ‘‘looking
direction’’) as an indicator of how field orientation is
perceived, and by establishing the (culture-specific) princi-
360 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
ples for FRONT assignment in the intrinsic and absolute FoR
on empirical rather than theoretical grounds.
One of the main differences between accounts simply
arises from their disciplinary background and traditions.
Most of them, originating in linguistics, present natural
language examples that are then analyzed and sorted into
categories. To various degrees, these categories are
modeled after the A-/B-series distinction, the ME/MT-per-
spectives on time, some reference point metaphors, or
other related conceptual sources. Another approach, which
is more closely related to representational accounts in
anthropology, psychology or cognitive science, begins by
covering the space of conceivable reference patterns and
derives from those the design principles for frames of ref-
erence, with the purpose of being broad enough to capture
a potentially large degree of cross-linguistic variability. The
resultant grid overlaps substantially with the categories
arising from the linguistic approach, but (presently) also
contains empty cells. For instance, apart from the genera-
tional terms reported by Radden (2004), no conclusive evi-
dence has yet been provided for a relative-reflective
reference pattern in the temporal domain (contrary to its
pervasiveness in space). The crucial question, then, is
whether languages can be found that may provide exam-
ples for the empty cells. Used in this way, such a grid
equips us with a powerful tool to discover new and inter-
esting phenomena. If, however, these cells remain empty,
we will still have gained valuable information with regard
to cognitive constraints on temporal referencing.
5. Empirical investigations: methods and tasks
Regardless of how thoroughly scholars may have
designed their cross-domain taxonomies for frames of
reference, the question of whether and how people really
do transfer spatial conceptualizations into the domain of
time—or are otherwise affected by spatial cues when engag-
ing in temporal reasoning—can only be answered through
empirical investigations. For the following overview, some
thirty studies were scrutinized, which differ with regard
to the theoretical stance they took, the methods they
adopted, and the findings they obtained. To facilitate com-
parison, we will first describe in necessary detail their main
methods, before presenting and discussing their findings
(Sections 6 and Section 7). The range of widely different
tasks can be sorted into the following types: (1) language
elicitation, typically combined with some sort of priming,
(2) analysis of bodily expressions such as gesture and pos-
tural sway, (3) elicitation of spatial layouts on which tem-
poral relations are mapped, and (4) implicit tasks that use
a reaction time paradigm with congruency priming.
5.1. Language elicitation tasks
Generally, elicitation tasks present some kind of (lin-
guistic or non-linguistic) stimuli and ask participants to
provide a linguistic description or response. This is the case
in the classic reference tasks where arrangements of
objects have to be described (e.g., Pederson et al., 1998;
Senft, 1995), either by way of free answers or instructions
for another person, or by selecting from a set of given
options. The descriptions are then analyzed in terms of
which FoRs they are based on. This type of task can easily
be transferred to the temporal domain.
5.1.1. Elicitation: the Wednesday’s meeting task
The classical elicitation paradigm in the temporal
domain revolves around moving an event (McGlone &
Harding, 1998): Participants are informed that ‘‘The meet-
ing originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been
moved forward two days.’’ When asked for the day on
which the meeting will now take place, two answer
options are provided (Monday and Friday), from which
participants can choose. The question is ambiguous in that
roughly half of US participants tend to choose Monday and
the other half Friday. The former choice is considered to be
consistent with an MT perspective and the latter with an
ME perspective.
If only two perspectives are to be distinguished, one
question is sufficient. If, however, more possible perspec-
tives are at stake, the original question with the event
located in the future needs to be supplemented by a ver-
sion in which the event is located in the past (Bender
et al., 2005; Núñez et al., 2006). According to the refer-
ence-point (RP) metaphors account (Núñez et al., 2006),
the past version forces participants to choose between an
interpretation either relative to Ego’s front (leading to a
futurewards movement) or relative to the front of the
sequence (leading to an earlier-movement). According to
the t-FoR account (Bender et al., 2005, 2010, 2012; Rothe-
Wulf et al., 2014), only the simultaneous consideration of
a past and a future reference discriminates between all
possible FoRs.
In either case, however, we have no way of detecting
mistakes which people may make in responding: Every
single combination of responses produces a sensible pat-
tern. This is generally true regarding all previous research
in this field, but it becomes more salient when the correct
diagnosis of specific FoRs is at stake. To address this con-
cern, more than one pair of questions should be used,
which enables one to assess intra-individual consistency
in addition to FoR choice. While detecting inconsistent
answers will not reveal whether participants made a mis-
take or simply changed their minds, consistent answers
may be interpreted as support for the assumption that a
specific FoR has indeed be adopted.
5.1.2. Linguistic priming (of the ME and MT perspective)
Typically, the Wednesday’s meeting question is embed-
ded in some sort of experimental context. In the original
study by McGlone and Harding (1998; and see Gentner
et al., 2002), this consisted of a list of similarly structured,
but non-ambiguous temporal sentences like: ‘‘We passed
the deadline two days ago’’. When the context consistently
suggested an ME perspective, participants preferred the
Friday response twice as often as the Monday response,
whereas this pattern switched when the context suggested
the MT perspective. The results are generally taken as evi-
dence for the psychological reality of the ME and MT per-
spective: They prove that taking either of these temporal
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
moving perspectives affects the way in which people inter-
pret an ambiguous temporal phrase.
Moving on from there, Boroditsky and her colleagues
crossed the ‘space–time barrier’ demonstrating that prim-
ing spatial perspectives may have similar effects. The
primes they used consist of spatial scenarios including a
picture and a sentence description, with the scenarios
either depicting a moving observer or a moving object
(Boroditsky, 2000), or involve imagined and real motion
(Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002).
5.1.3. Visual priming (of additional perspectives and/or frames
of reference)
In a similar vein, the Wednesday’s meeting question can
be used to explore the psychological reality of other tempo-
ral concepts or metaphors which are claimed to be also used
to process temporal information. Núñez et al. (2006), for
instance, sought to provide evidence for the relevance of
what they term the ‘‘Time-RP’’ metaphor (i.e., an Ego-free
MT perspective; Section 3.2). In order to foreground the
anterior/posterior relation, which is also inherent in non-
deictic event sequences (B-series), they used visual primes
that consist of a graphical array of objects sliding horizon-
tally across a screen. Likewise, in order to demonstrate the
relevance of an ‘‘extrinsic’’ (= absolute) FoR, Kranjec (2006)
attempted to foreground the superordinate field, with two
types of stimuli: a single entity moving over some kind of
ground, and the picture of a river coming down from a
mountain, for which the path of motion had to be indicated.
Finally, Rothe-Wulf and colleagues (2014) intended to
directly investigate the relation between four distinct spa-
tial FoRs and their temporal counterparts, as proposed by
Bender and colleagues (2010). In order to activate a specific
(spatial) FoR, they used as primes three sets of pictures, all
of which show a superordinate entity in motion (i.e., a con-
veyor belt, train, or river) as well as smaller entities located
in the superordinate entity; when required for the relative
FoR, an observer (outside this superordinate entity) was
added to the picture. The picture was accompanied by a
few sentences that describe the scene in a way compatible
with one of the four FoRs to be foregrounded in the respec-
tive condition. A final test question on the relation
between two entities ensured that participants indeed
adopted the primed FoR.
5.2. Analysis of bodily expressions
Bodily expressions accompany most of what we try to
communicate, ranging from the emotions we are
experiencing (Darwin, 1872; Meeren, van Heijnsbergen, &
de Gelder, 2005; Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010) to
complex cognitive ideas (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; McNeill,
1992). The two types of bodily expressions that have been
used to date for investigating space–time mapping include
co-speech gesture and postural sway.
5.2.1. Co-speech gesture
People spontaneously and mostly unconsciously use
gesture in conjunction with words (Iverson & Goldin-
Meadow, 1998; McNeill, 1992; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006),
361
and these gestures may convey meaning that is not only
relevant to their verbal expressions but also completes
them (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Le Guen, 2011a). As gestures
naturally unfold in space, they also provide ecologically
valid information about how abstract concepts are spa-
tially structured by the speaker (Cooperrider & Núñez,
2009; Núñez et al., 2012).
The task assigned to elicit gestural data is similar to the
previously described language elicitation task in that its
main purpose is to induce people to talk about a certain
domain, for instance by asking them to explain temporal
expressions (Núñez et al., 2012), to re-tell a brief story they
have just studied (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012), or to tell the
(depicted) history of the universe (Cooperrider & Núñez,
2009). To capture co-speech gesture, people are videotaped
while talking, for later transcription and analysis. For the
investigation of spatial and temporal representations, cod-
ing the position and orientation of the speaker (with regard
to the fixed bearings of a potential absolute frame of refer-
ence) is crucial. Ideally, this orientation is rotated midway
through the interview to disentangle overlapping FoRs (Le
Guen, 2011a). It may also be revealing to contrast indoor
and outdoor settings, as blocking visual contact with land-
marks may suspend a possible adoption of the absolute
FoR (Núñez et al., 2012). For data analysis, references to
deictic time versus non-deictic or sequence time need to
be distinguished, as these two are assumed to recruit dis-
tinct axes (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Emmorey, 2002;
Núñez et al., 2012).
To compare spontaneous with deliberate gesture
production, Casasanto and Jasmin (2012) also asked their
participants to make gesture demonstrations that they
believe would most naturally accompany speech about
earlier and later times.
A reversed strategy was employed by Jamalian and
Tversky (2012) who provided gestures together with the
verbal description of a cyclical temporal sequence (e.g.,
from seed to flower) or with the Wednesday’s meeting
task. Participants were then asked to depict the sequence
in schematic diagrams or indicate the next step after its
completion, or to identify the date to which the meeting
has been moved, respectively. Responses were then coded
according to whether they are in line with the accompany-
ing circular versus linear gesture (in sequence description)
or forward versus backward gesture (the Wednesday’s
meeting task).
5.2.2. Postural sway
People do not only speak with their hands; often,
their whole body is involved. The fact that this type of
information may reveal underlying conceptions of time
has been shown by Miles et al. (2010). They requested
participants to embark on a mental time travel into the
future (i.e., to imagine what their everyday life circum-
stances might be like four years in the future = prospec-
tion) or the past (to recall such circumstances four years
previously = retrospection) and to envisage the events of
a typical day. A magnetic motion-tracking system was
used to measure movement (postural sway) in the hori-
zontal plane.
362 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
5.3. Mapping temporal relations on spatial layouts
The third type of task, like the previous one, is largely
non-linguistic and recruits space as the medium for tem-
poral representations, but does so in a less spontaneous
way. Over the years, the following variants have been
developed, which differ in sometimes small, but important
aspects, and are therefore described sequentially.
5.3.1. Graphic productions
The task was designed by Tversky, Kugelmass, and
Winter (1991) to explore how space comes to be used for
representing non-spatial relations. Five sub-tasks are used,
with one each devoted to spatial, imagined spatial, tempo-
ral, quantitative, and preference concepts (each including
two or three parts). In the temporal sub-task, participants
are provided with a reference point in space: A sticker,
which represents the middle event of a tripartite sequence,
is placed on a blank sheet of paper. Sequences consist of
meals, activities, and times of the day. The instructions
run as in the following example (for children):
‘‘Now I want you to think about the times of day that
we eat meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I will put a
sticker down for lunch time, and I want you to put a
sticker for dinner time and a sticker for breakfast time.
Here’s where I’m putting a sticker for lunch time. Now
you put a sticker for dinner time (pause), and another
sticker for breakfast time.’’ (Tversky et al., 1991, p. 526)
The task produces two general types of data: the type of
the representation (i.e., nonlinear, ordered, or interval),
and its direction. Of interest here is the direction of the
ordered representations. To be categorized as ‘‘ordered’’,
stickers had to be separate, properly ordered (in any direc-
tion), and more or less in one line7; direction was scored as
left-to-right (LR), right-to-left (RL), top-to-bottom (TB), and
bottom-to-top (BT). Please note that, in this case, ‘‘top’’
and ‘‘bottom’’ refer to the sheet of paper used as pad and
thus are located in the horizontal plane. In other studies
(e.g., Brown, 2012) and the remainder of this review, these
responses are categorized instead as far-to-near (FN) and
near-to-far (NF), respectively.
As described above (in Section 5.2.1), Jamalian and
Tversky (2012, Exp. 1) asked participants to construct ‘‘a
simple schematic diagram’’ to convey cyclical temporal
sequences that were described to them verbally (accompa-
nied by gestural priming). In this case, diagrams are coded
as circular (with the last event being connected back to the
first) or linear (without any such connection).
5.3.2. Temporal landscapes
A similar principle is used by Zinken, Sampaio, da Silva
Sinha, and Sinha (2005; and see Sinha et al., 2011) for their
temporal landscapes task, which consists of three parts. In
7
Examples of nonlinear responses included stickers forming a triangle
rather than a line or representing events out of order (e.g., breakfast—
dinner—lunch). Unfortunately, this category was excluded from the anal-
ysis, which eliminated not only 15–40% of the data for the youngest
children and 6–25% for the older children, but also, and more importantly,
potential information on nonlinear time concepts.
the two calendar installations, participants are provided
with a larger number of tokens to be used as representa-
tions of conventional time intervals (i.e., seasons and their
sub-intervals or constituents, and times of the day). Partic-
ipants are then asked to ‘‘make a map of the year (or day)’’,
in which each token should represent one interval of time.
The design of this task differs from the previous one, in that
it (i) more strongly emphasizes the cyclical character of the
temporal entities under scrutiny by using terms for the
annual and diurnal cycle and by illustrating the task with
a circular diagram, (ii) provides a substantially larger num-
ber of tokens which, in principle, allows for a broader vari-
ety of arrangements, and (iii) does not prompt participants
with a reference point (i.e., the central stage is not placed
for them). The third part of the task, the time landscape
game, involves tokens to be used as representations of time
intervals. Two of these tokens (or a token and a doll) are
placed in line, perpendicular to the participant’s gaze.
One token is then moved along the imaginary line so that
it reverses its position in relation to the other token (or
the doll, respectively). Participants are asked to describe
what they saw.
5.3.3. Picture arrangement task
Chan and Bergen (2005; Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012) devel-
oped Tversky’s design into a card arrangement task, in which
the tokens are not blank but contain black and white images
of the entities in question. The five sets of three cards each
depict growing stages of a living being (i.e., tree, chicken,
butterfly, frog, and woman). As in the original study
(Tversky et al., 1991), the cards have to be arranged on a
white sheet of paper ‘‘in sequence from the earliest to the
latest stage’’ (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012, p. 3), but partici-
pants are not prompted with a reference point.
5.3.4. Time arrangement tasks
The question that is most relevant for this review is
whether the spatial FoRs that are preferred in a given
speech community may have an impact on how its mem-
bers conceptualize the passage of time. To address this
question, the layout tasks had to be further modified: A
rotation of participants halfway through the sitting is
essential in order to disambiguate responses with respect
to whether they are based on an absolute s-FoR (oriented,
e.g., in line with cardinal directions) or a relative s-FoR
(from the participant’s own perspective). The version of
the task designed specifically for this purpose consists of
two parts: a card arranging task and a time-points task
(Boroditsky, Gaby, & Levinson, 2008).
For the card arranging task, eight sets of four cards each
are used. The cards in each set contain photographs that
depict a temporal progression, such as stages in a life cycle
or an event developing through time. Participants are asked
to set them down ‘‘so that they are in the correct order’’.
For the time-points task, participants are provided with
a reference point—for instance, by pointing abstractly to
a central spot in the air (affording a 3D representation)
or by placing a token on the ground directly in front of
the participant (for a 2D representation)—and are then
asked to locate related temporal expressions in reference
to the first mark. More specifically, the instructions are
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
shaped as follows: ‘‘If I tell you that this here is today,
where would you put yesterday? And where would you
put tomorrow?’’ Altogether, twelve sets of three tempo-
rally ordered terms each are used.
The sessions are videotaped and responses coded for
later analysis. The tasks are described in more detail in
the MPI Field Manual (Boroditsky et al., 2008; also available
online) and are part of a larger cross-linguistic survey on
temporal representations (for respective studies, see
Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Brown, 2012; de Sousa, 2012;
Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012; Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010;
Gaby, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012; Levinson &
Majid, 2013).
5.4. Implicit tasks: reaction time paradigm based on
congruency priming
The final type of task is also largely non-linguistic, but
takes an indirect approach by contrasting experimental
conditions that are either congruent or incongruent with
assumed spatio-temporal links. The task labels used here
are invented on the spot (derived from the stimuli used)
to aid discrimination of and reference to these tasks in
the remainder of the paper.
Stimuli typically belong to either a past or future cate-
gory (e.g., words in the past vs. future tense, or pictures
of persons or buildings from the past vs. present/future,
of persons at a younger vs. older age, or events at an earlier
vs. later stage). Stimuli are presented on a computer screen
and have to be categorized, typically by pressing one of
two keys. Mapping each stimulus category to one of the
two locations of the keys creates congruent and incongru-
ent conditions. For instance, mapping past onto the left key
and future onto the right constitutes one condition (pre-
sumably the congruent one), while the reversed mapping
constitutes the other condition. Participants’ reaction time
and accuracy in making their decision are recorded. If map-
ping conditions produce a main effect, the faster (and/or
more accurate) condition is identified as the congruent con-
dition, thus revealing the existence and direction of the
underlying cognitive space–time mapping. The experimen-
tal designs described in the following modify this general
idea in various ways, some of which are crucial for data
interpretation.
5.4.1. Tensed words, laterally displaced
Participants are presented with verbal stimuli, one after
another, which may appear either on the left or right side
of the screen. The stimuli consist of tensed verbs and tem-
poral adverbs. Stimulus category (past/future) is indicated
by pressing one of two laterally displaced response keys
(Santiago, Lupiáñez, Pérez, & Funes, 2007; for different
versions of this task, see also Ouellet, Santiago, Funes, &
Lupiáñez, 2010a; Ouellet, Santiago, Israeli, & Gabay,
2010b).
5.4.2. Actors of two ages, non-lateralized
A similar design is used in Experiment 1 of Weger and
Pratt’s (2008) study, but with two crucial modifications:
Their stimuli are non-ordered (pictures of formerly or cur-
363
rently popular actors) and non-lateralized (presented cen-
ter-screen). Stimulus category (‘‘before’’ or ‘‘after’’
participants were born) is indicated by pressing one of
two laterally displaced response keys.
In a second experiment, verbal stimuli are presented
center-screen, followed by a white circle that may appear
on the left or right side of the screen. Circle location is indi-
cated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response
keys. Whereas the question pursued in Experiment 1 (as
in previous studies) is whether congruent space–time
mapping facilitates temporal judgments, Experiment 2
investigates whether temporal cues may affect visuospa-
tial attention and facilitate spatial responses.
5.4.3. Speech balloon with tensed words, twofold displaced
In addition to the stimuli used in the first task
(Santiago et al., 2007), the main experiment in Torralbo,
Santiago, and Lupiáñez’ (2006) study introduces an exter-
nal perspective: Participants are presented center-screen
with a side-view silhouette of a person’s head, looking
either left- or rightwards. The verbal stimuli are pre-
sented in a speech balloon and appear either in the back
or front of the silhouette, either on the left or right side of
the screen. In one version, stimulus category (past/future)
is indicated verbally, while in another version, it is indi-
cated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response
keys. Trials can be congruent along the lateral (left/right)
axis and/or along the sagittal (back/front) axis (in the sec-
ond version this is further crossed with response
congruency).
5.4.4. Temporal entities of two stages, non-lateralized
A similar goal is pursued by Boroditsky, Fuhrman, and
McCormick (2011), but in a different version: Instead of
crossing a lateral condition with a sagittal one, they cross
a lateral (horizontal) condition with a vertical one. To this
end, participants are presented with pairs of images, one
after the other, all appearing center-screen. Each pair of
images depicts the same entity at two different stages
(e.g., a picture of a person at a younger and an older age).
Participants are asked whether the second image shows a
conceptually earlier or later time-point than the first
image. Responses are given by pressing one of two adja-
cent keys. For half of the participants, keys are arranged
horizontally (on the left/right axis), while for the other half
they are arranged vertically (perpendicular to the tabletop,
on the up/down axis).
5.4.5. Buildings of two ages, non-lateralized
A similar principle is adopted by Miles, Tan, Noble,
Lumsden, and Macrae (2011), with the exception that the
vertical response is not defined in 3-dimensional, but in
2-dimensional space. Participants are presented with
images, one after another, all appearing center-screen.
The images depict buildings and cities, representing the
past or a (science fiction) future. Stimulus category (past/
future) is indicated by pressing one of four spatially dis-
placed response keys, to which participants have to move
their finger right versus left (horizontal condition) or up
versus down (vertical condition). Please note that, although
364 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
for vertical responses the same keypad was used, it was
mounted on an incline to ensure up/down movements to
some extent.
5.4.6. Temporal sequences, non-lateralized
A version that extends stimuli presentation to larger
sequences was designed by Santiago, Román, Ouellet,
Rodríguez, and Pérez-Azor (2010) to investigate not only
congruency effects for space–time mapping, but also a pos-
sible distance effect for temporal entities that are more or
less removed from a reference point. To this end, partici-
pants are presented with an unfolding sequence of every-
day activities (in one version by way of video clips, in a
second version by way of pictures) at full screen size. This
is followed by an order judgment task: Whether a given
scene comes ‘‘before’’ or ‘‘after’’ the reference scene is indi-
cated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response
keys.
5.5. Discussion of methods and tasks
The four types of tasks described above differ not only
in the details of how they are designed and conducted,
but also in the questions they allow us to address. In the
following, we briefly discuss their strengths and weak-
nesses, before turning to the data obtained from them.
For identifying temporal frames of reference and
assessing the degree to which they reflect space–time
mapping, a language elicitation task provides a necessary
first step. After all, temporal referencing is a linguistic
activity, and systematic data collection on how people
do this provides the foundation for any subsequent anal-
ysis. In space, this can be accomplished in a straightfor-
ward manner, and large-scale surveys have bestowed on
us a cornucopia of data on cross-cultural variability in
spatial FoR use (e.g., Beller et al., 2014; Bennardo, 2002;
Haun et al., 2006, 2011; Hüther et al., 2013; Levinson,
2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Majid et al., 2004;
Senft, 1997). The same is not true for the temporal
domain—partly due to its non-tangible nature, and partly
due to the ongoing debate on what might count as an
act of referencing in contrast to simply reading off the
meaning from the words used.
The Wednesday’s meeting task (see Section 5.1.1) pro-
vides an exception in that it allows for more than one read-
ing, which opens the door for experimental manipulations
aimed at testing potentially influential factors. However,
the task is peculiar in at least two ways. First, it employs
a dynamic situation (the movement of an event), whereas
in the spatial domain, static settings are more typically
used. As mentioned above, there is some controversy as
to whether static and dynamic settings are fundamentally
different (Tenbrink, 2011) or may be covered by the same,
slightly modified typology of FoRs (Bender et al., 2010,
2012; Levinson, 2003). The second peculiarity is related
to the previous concern in that this whole line of research
hinges on one type of phrase and its possible readings:
‘‘Moving X forward’’ is not only inherently under-specified
in theory (Rothe-Wulf et al., 2014), but also happens to
produce ambiguity in practice, at least among speakers of
English (the same is true for ‘‘advancing X’’ and ‘‘pushing
X back’’; see McGlone & Harding, 1998). To the best of
our knowledge, these three phrases provide the only
instance of such an ambiguity and thus have to shoulder
the entire weight of empirical testing in this field. The fact
that in many other languages, these phrases are not dis-
cernibly ambiguous—in the sense of producing equally split
readings—renders cross-linguistic comparisons a contro-
versial endeavor.
In contrast to this linguistic task, the documentation of
bodily expressions (Section 5.2), the spatial layout tasks
(Section 5.3), and the implicit tasks based on congruency
priming (Section 5.4) do not take verbal output as their
prime data, but recruit space as the (implicit) medium
for expressing temporal relations. As participants are typi-
cally not aware of the purpose of the tasks, they are likely
to respond spontaneously, thus revealing implicit repre-
sentations. In stark contrast to the implicit congruency
tasks, the other two types (bodily expressions and spatial
layout tasks) entail a largely open format, which makes
them highly suitable for exploratory purposes. But even
these tasks are not entirely impartial: Postural sway and
most versions of the layout tasks (except for the 3D version
of the time-points task; Section 5.3.4) are restricted to 2-
dimensional responses in the horizontal plane, thus pre-
empting vertical representations. And in some cases (such
as possibly in the temporal landscape task described in Sec-
tion 5.3.2), the tokens used may be too large in size and
number to afford unrestricted arrangement in the available
working space (Sinha et al., 2011, p. 151). Even the gestural
data (including the 3D pointing task) is constrained to
some extent by the body, which blocks genuinely back-
wards pointing.
Furthermore, the basic question of whether space–time
mappings are considered sensible in a speech community
cannot be answered unambiguously with these tasks. Both
bodily expressions and spatial layouts have an inherent
spatial dimension. Co-speech gestures and postural sway
unfold in space, regardless of the domain for which they
may be emblematic. Likewise, abstract pointing and
arrangement of tokens is also fundamentally spatial in
nature. In all of these cases, any possibly observed cross-
domain consistency could be attributed to this shared spa-
tial dimension, whereas unsystematic response patterns
may have multiple causes (Bender et al., 2012).
The implicit tasks based on congruency priming, on the
other hand, do allow the extent of such space–time map-
ping to be assessed. Most often, however, they are fairly
restrictive with regard to the dimension for which congru-
ency is assumed and/or scrutinized (in most examples for
this type of task, this is the lateral left/right axis). More-
over, task-specific characteristics appear to affect partici-
pants’ responses (Torralbo et al., 2006).
To sum up, the Wednesday’s meeting task is useful for
discriminating several t-FoRs (at least to a certain extent)
and for identifying factors influencing their adoption. Its
weaknesses are its singularity, the fact that it predomi-
nantly produces linguistic data, and that these data are
not unambiguous. Bodily expressions and spatial layouts,
on the other hand, are non-verbal and more implicit, and
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
provide an efficient way to assess spatial representations
of time. However, the evidence they obtain is at least partly
confounded with the inherent spatial nature of the task.
Implicit congruency tasks, finally, yield more valid data
on the true extent of space–time mapping, but cannot be
used for exploring the full space of mapping options, and
cannot be informative of referencing preferences, as they
typically pre-define response patterns (e.g., along the left/
right dimension). Since no single task is adequate to
answer the full set of questions in a satisfactory manner,
the best advice that can be derived from this overview is
to combine different methods and exploit a variety of data
sources.
6. Empirical evidence
The following overview comprises some thirty empiri-
cal studies on temporal representations and space–time
mapping. With few exceptions, none of these studies
explicitly addresses temporal FoRs; however, their findings
are relevant and instructive for assessing the theoretical
accounts presented in the first part of this review. The
studies compiled here include, in total, speakers of sixteen
different languages, which will be pooled into nine clusters
based on relatedness. Although some of the studies were
designed as cross-linguistic comparisons, we first present
data for each language cluster separately (current section;
overview in Table 9); this allows us to provide some
descriptive information on each of the clusters as a back-
ground for the empirical findings—especially for those
cases for which strong claims on variability have been
put forward. The relevance of these findings for the theo-
retical questions posed above is then discussed in
Section 7.
6.1. Indo-European languages
Of the languages belonging to the Indo-European fam-
ily, four have been investigated to a considerable extent
in this field of research: English, Swedish, German, and
Spanish. We take English as the starting point—for the sole
reason that most studies were conducted with speakers of
this language and that respective findings are occasionally
(even if implicitly) taken as a reference point or even as
indicative of temporal representations and processing in
general.
6.1.1. English
English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-
European language family. According to Ethnologue8, it is
the native language to 335 million people around the
world, and an official or national language in more than
50 countries. With two exceptions, the findings reported
here all originate from studies conducted in the US
(especially in California, with some additional data from
Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Hawai’i); Weger
8
Where available, information on numbers of speakers was taken from
Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/; see also Lewis, Simons, & Fennig,
2013).
365
and Pratt (2008) collected their data in Toronto/Canada,
and Miles and colleagues (2010, 2011) in Aberdeen/
Scotland.
A wealth of data is available on patterns of reference
and spatial representations (overview in Levinson, 2003),
on spatial gesture (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, 2003; McNeill,
1992), and on metaphorical space–time mappings in lan-
guage (e.g., Bennett, 1975; Clark, 1973; Evans, 2003;
Haspelmath, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Miller
& Johnson-Laird, 1976; Radden, 2004; Traugott, 1978). In
a nutshell, these studies indicate that speakers of English
make use of all three spatial FoRs for describing locations
and movements in space (with a preference for intrinsic
and relative in small-scale space, and absolute in large-
scale space), that spatial vocabulary is mapped onto time
(which is what triggered this line of research in the first
place), and that time in co-speech gesture is also spatially
construed (Cienki, 1998; McNeill, 1992).
The metaphorical space–time mapping adopted in lan-
guage suggests preferential recruitment of the sagittal axis,
with past and future mapped on BACK and FRONT, respectively
(e.g., the future ‘‘ahead’’, and olden days ‘‘passed by’’). As
we have seen above, however, the reverse direction is also
possible, attested to in language elicitation tasks (Sec-
tion 5.1), in which only half of the speakers tend to move
Wednesday’s meeting ‘‘forward’’ to a future date, while
the other half moves it pastwards.
Interestingly, however, this linguistic preference was
confirmed on a behavioral level only in a minority of
empirical studies. In a spatial layout task, Fuhrman and
Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 1b [3D pointing]) found a small per-
centage of responses along the sagittal axis. Postural sway
is also compatible with a BF9 time line (Miles et al., 2010),
and data on deliberate gestures reveal that people do concep-
tualize time along this time line (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012,
Exp. 1). Data on spontaneous gestures, however, indicates
adoption of the sagittal axis for deictic time only and with
considerable flexibility (i.e., no marked preference for BF
over FB; see Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012, Exp. 2). More impor-
tantly, these data attest to a preference of the lateral axis
over the sagittal axis, specifically for sequence time
(Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012). Adoption of the sagittal axis
for deictic and of the lateral axis for non-deictic expres-
sions—with future in front or to the right, and past in the
back or to the left—has also been documented for American
Sign Language ASL (Emmorey, 2002) and French (Calbris,
1990).
The remainder of the findings, including some gestural
data, most spatial layout data, and all congruency priming
data, coherently indicate a preference for the lateral axis in
LR direction (see Table 9). Although the design of most of
these studies restricted the range of possible responses to
one or two dimensions, this constraint does not hold gen-
erally and does not invalidate the general trend (see espe-
cially Fuhrman et al., 2011).
The empirical studies across a broad range of methods
thus suggest that native speakers of English recruit two
distinct axes: (i) the sagittal axis, presumably in both
9
Abbreviations of directions are explained in footnote to Table 9.
366 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382

Table 9
Preferences for dimension and direction of the time line axes (direction in brackets were given with still substantial, but lower frequency than main responses).

Language Main findings Type of task Design n References

English BF and FB Moving meeting BF design (ling.) 279 Bender et al. (2010), Rothe-Wulf et al.
(2014)a
LR Gesture Open (LR stimuli) 50 Cooperrider and Núñez (2009)
BF (and LR) Gesture (delib.) Open 32 Casasanto and Jasmin (2012, Exp. 1)
LR (and BF/FB) Gesture (spont.) Open 28 Casasanto and Jasmin (2012, Exp. 2)
BF Postural sway Open 20 Miles et al. (2010)
LR Spatial layout On plane 520 Tversky et al. (1991)
LR Spatial layout Open 13 Boroditsky (2008)
LR (and BF ¼ NF) Spatial layout On plane and open 24 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 1)
LR Spatial layout On plane 10 Boroditsky and Gaby (2010)
LR Spatial layout On plane 10 Bergen and Chan Lau (2012)
LR Congr. priming LR design 50 Weger and Pratt (2008)
LR Congr. priming LR design 85 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 2+3)
LR Congr. priming Horiz. vs. vertical 19 Miles et al. (2011, Exp. 1)
(inclined)
LR Congr. priming Horiz. vs. vertical 118 Boroditsky et al. (2011)
LR Congr. priming 3D 59 Fuhrman et al. (2011)
LR Congr. priming LR vs: TB ½¼ FN 32 Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013)

Swedish BF Moving meeting BF design (ling.) 284 Rothe-Wulf et al. (2014)

German FB Moving meeting BF design (ling.) 279 Bender et al. (2010),

Rothe-Wulf et al. (2014)
LR Congr. priming LR design 30 Ulrich and Maienborn (2010; Exp. 1)
BF Congr. priming BF design 60 Ulrich et al. (2012, Exp. 1)

Spanish BF Congr. priming BF þ LR 57 Torralbo et al. (2006)

LR LR design
LR Congr. priming LR design 32 Santiago et al. (2007)
LR Congr. priming LR design 96 Santiago et al. (2010)
LR Congr. priming LR design 93 Ouellet et al. (2010a)
LR Congr. priming LR design 20 Ouellet et al. (2010b)

Hebrew More RL than LR Spatial layout On plane 366 Tversky et al. (1991)
RL (and BF ¼ NF) Spatial layout On plane and open 24 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 1)
RL Congr. priming LR design 82 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 2 + 3)
RL Congr. priming LR design 28 Ouellet et al. (2010b)

Arabic RL (and TB [= FN]) Spatial layout On plane 283 Tversky et al. (1991)
Mandarin (US) LR (and UD) Spatial layout Open 42 Boroditsky (2008)
LR and UD Congr. priming Horiz. vs. vertical 63 Boroditsky et al. (2011)
Mandarin (P.R. China) FB Moving meeting BF design (ling.) 163 Bender et al. (2010)
LR (and TB [= FN]) Spatial layout On plane 33 Bergen and Chan Lau (2012)
UD (and LR) Congr. priming 3D 75 Fuhrman et al. (2011)
LR Congr. priming LR vs: TB ½¼ FN 40 Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013)

Mandarin (Taiwan) LR and TB [= FN] (and RL) Spatial layout On plane 38 Bergen and Chan Lau (2012)
LR (and UD) Spatial layout Open 15 Boroditsky (2008)
TB [= FN] Congr. priming LR vs: TB ½¼ FN 32 Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013)

Mandarin (Singapore) LR and TB [= FB/UD] Spatial layout On plane 32 Miles et al. (2011, Exp. 2)
LR and TB [= FB/UD] Congr. priming Horiz. vs. vertical 25 Miles et al. (2011, Exp. 1)
(inclined)
Cantonese LR (and RL) Spatial layout On plane and open 10 de Sousa (2012)
Tongan BF + FB Moving meeting BF design (ling.) 120 Bender et al. (2010)

Yupno down-/uphill Gesture Open 27 Núñez et al. (2012)

Yélî Dnye LR > NF/FN > East/West Spatial layout On plane 10 Levinson and Majid (2013)
Kuuk Thaayorre East/West Spatial layout On plane 14 Boroditsky and Gaby (2010)
East/West Spatial layout On plane 6 Gaby (2012)
Aymara FB (and LR) Gesture Open 30 Núñez and Sweetser (2006)
Tzeltal Maya LR > NF > Spatial layout On plane 12 Brown (2012)
East/West > DU >
down-/uphill
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382 367

Table 9 (continued)

Language Main findings Type of task Design n References

Yucatec Maya cyclical (radial) Gesture Open 10 Le Guen and Pool Balam (2012)
LR > DU > RL > cycle > FN > NF Spatial layout On plane and open 26 Le Guen and Pool Balam (2012)
Amondawa LR and RL Spatial layout On plane 4 Sinha et al. (2011)

Note. The following abbreviations are used (here and in the remainder of this paper):
LR = lateral axis (left/right, without indication of direction), LR = left-to-right, RL = right-to-left;
BF = sagittal axis (back/front, without indication of direction), BF = back-to-front, FB = front-to-back;
UD = vertical axis (up/down, without indication of direction), UD = up-to-down, DU = down-to-up (observed as pile-up solution in the card task only); in
contrast to TB in real space;
TB = top–bottom (top/bottom, without indication of direction), TB = top-to-bottom; BT = bottom-to-top; please note that this orientation is specified in the
reference frame of a sheet of paper or the computer keyboard, with ‘‘top’’ referring to the top (further away side) of the page or keyboard, respectively (as
used, e.g., by Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Tversky et al., 1991); more accurately, it would be classified as FN = far-to-near or NF = near-to-far, respectively (in
the case of Miles et al., 2011, reclassification as FB or even UD is also acceptable).
a
Converging data on English with language elicitation tasks was also collected, among others, by McGlone and Harding (1998), Boroditsky (2000),
Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002), Kranjec (2006), and Núñez et al. (2006). Although not reported here, these are referred to in the discussion of findings in the
text.

directions (preferably BF when linguistically referring to
deictic time, with past events as in their back and future
events as ahead, but also reversed in some cases), and (ii)
the lateral axis exclusively in LR direction, when depicting
the unfolding of events, for instance in writing, graphs, or
signed language. Both axes are not only cognitively avail-
able for information processing, but also appear to be
embodied to a certain extent, as emerging in co-speech
gesture and postural sway.
6.1.2. Swedish and German
Swedish and German, like English, belong to the Ger-
manic branch of the Indo-European language family.
Swedish is spoken as the native language by roughly 8 mil-
lion people in Sweden (with some additional distribution
in Denmark and Finland). German is spoken as the native
language by roughly 84 million people, mostly in Central
Europe (with some additional major settlements in
Kazakhstan, Namibia, and Paraguay), and is an official lan-
guage in five states. The findings reported here originate
from studies conducted in Sweden (Göteborg) and Ger-
many (Freiburg and Tübingen), respectively.
Compared to English, considerably less research has
been conducted in these two languages on patterns of ref-
erence and spatial representations (and none, to the best of
our knowledge, on temporal co-speech gesture; for excep-
tions, see Ladewig, 2011; Müller, 1998, 2008). Yet, speak-
ers of German are known to make use of all three spatial
FoRs for describing locations and movements in space,
with a preference for the intrinsic and relative FoR (and
here for the reflective variant) in small-scale space, and
the absolute FoR in large-scale space (Beller et al., 2014;
Grabowski & Weiß, 1996a, 1996b; Herrmann &
Grabowski, 1998; Herrmann & Schweizer, 1998), and most
likely the same is true for speakers of Swedish (Grabowski
& Weiß, 1996a). The existing literature also reports exten-
sive metaphorical space–time mappings in language (e.g.,
Grabowski & Miller, 2000; Grabowski & Weiß, 1996a,
1996b; Hellberg, 2007; Radden, 2004).
As in English, the linguistic space–time mapping
adopted in Swedish and German suggests preferential
recruitment of the sagittal axis, with past and future mapped
on BACK and FRONT, respectively. Interestingly, however,
speakers of the two languages differ fundamentally in
how they respond to the Wednesday’s meeting task: The
vast majority of Swedish speakers move the meeting
‘‘forward’’ to a later date, German speakers to an earlier date
(Bender et al., 2010; Rothe-Wulf, Beller, & Bender, 2014).
Recruitment of the sagittal axis BF in speakers of
German was also observed in a congruency priming task,
in which responses to past- versus future-related sen-
tences had to be made by moving a (sagittal) slider back
and forth (Ulrich et al., 2012). However, when left- versus
right-hand responses were required instead, the obtained
congruency effect reflected a time line along the lateral
axis LR (Ulrich & Maienborn, 2010). As these two studies
used the exact same material (i.e., tensed sentences that
either did or did not have meaning), it appears unlikely
that recruitment of either axis (exclusively) depends on
the deictic or non-deictic nature of the stimulus.
6.1.3. Spanish
Spanish belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-
European language family. It is spoken as the native lan-
guage by roughly 400 million people around the world,
and is an official or national language in more than 20
countries. The findings reported here all originate from
studies conducted in Spain (largely from Granada).
The majority of studies so far predominantly explored
space–time mappings by way of congruency priming tasks
and report a strong preference for the lateral axis in LR
direction (Ouellet et al., 2010a, 2010b; Santiago et al.,
2007, 2010; Torralbo et al., 2006). By requesting a left/right
mapping on response keys, however, the task specifics may
have suggested this kind of mapping. The fact that
mapping may switch depending on such context factors
has been demonstrated by Torralbo et al. (2006). In one
version of the speech balloon task (Section 5.4.3),
responses had to be given by pressing one of two keys,
and participants exhibited a main effect of LR congruency.
However, in the version in which responses were given
vocally, the LR congruency effect gave way to a BF congru-
ency effect. These findings indicate a preference for the
sagittal mapping for time, but sufficient flexibility in this
preference to be overridden in tasks that emphasize the
lateral axis (Torralbo et al., 2006).
368 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
Two aspects are additionally noteworthy. First, the
adopted temporal perspective—even for deictic stimuli—
need not be egocentric, but may be allocentric. The point
of view to be taken in the speech balloon task is anchored
in the face silhouette on the screen, and aligned to its per-
spective. In a similar fashion, the congruency priming task
by Santiago and colleagues (2010), described in Sec-
tion 5.4.6, asked participants to adopt a specific scene
within a sequence as the reference point and to decide
whether another scene comes ‘‘before’’ or ‘‘after’’ it
(whereas from the participants’ point of view, all scenes
had come before now). In both studies (combined
n = 126), participants exhibited congruency effects relative
to this requested point of view.
And second, the study by Santiago and colleagues
(2010) also obtained a distance effect: Responses were fas-
ter, when the target scene was more distant from the ref-
erence scene. In other words, proximal scenes are harder
to discriminate from a reference scene than distal
scenes—in either direction, past and future.
6.2. Hebrew and Arabic
Hebrew and Arabic belong to the Semitic branch of the
Afro-Asiatic language family. Hebrew is spoken by 5 mil-
lion people, basically in Israel (with some additional distri-
bution elsewhere, specifically as the liturgical language);
Arabic is spoken by roughly 225 million people in Northern
Africa and the Middle East, and is an official language in 26
states. All findings reported here (including those on Ara-
bic speakers) originate from studies conducted in Israel.
The variable that has attracted most interest is the—com-
pared to English—reversed writing direction. In their semi-
nal study, Tversky and colleagues (1991) compared
speakers of three languages with different writing systems:
English, which is written left to right (LR), Arabic, which is
written right to left (RL), and Hebrew in which letters are
written RL, but most characters are formed, numbers writ-
ten, and arithmetic operations performed in the opposite
direction, LR (Tversky et al., 1991; and see Shaki, Fischer, &
Petrusic, 2009). As detailed in Section 5.3.1, the study com-
prised five tasks, and the main finding for the temporal task
was a strong effect of language: a clear LR preference among
English speakers, a strong RL and secondary TB preference
among Arabic speakers, and more RL than LR among Hebrew
speakers (please recall that, what in the classification of
Tversky et al., 1991, is labeled TB, is actually performed
along the sagittal axis and thus corresponds to FN). These
findings were taken as evidence for the assumption that
temporal relations are indeed represented by spatial means,
and that the direction of writing and reading affects the
direction of the temporal representation.
A preference for the lateral axis (RL) in Hebrew has also
been found in subsequent studies and with modified tech-
niques (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet et al., 2010b),
some of which, however, had a design that constrained
responses to the lateral axis. The only other spatial layout
task (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010, Exp. 1b [3D pointing])
also produced a small percentage of responses along the
sagittal axis, but unfortunately, the exact proportion of
responses and direction of the axis remain unclear (18.2%
of all responses, aggregated across English and Hebrew
speakers, are reported to ‘‘put later events further in front
of the body 93% of the time’’).
6.3. Chinese
China is home to speakers of roughly 300 different
languages, which belong to eight major language families.
Chinese is the name for a cluster of languages that together
make up the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language
family. Many of the languages in the Chinese cluster are
not mutually intelligible, and some of these are comprised
of varieties that are not mutually intelligible either. Two of
the largest languages in this cluster are Mandarin and Yue
(Cantonese). Mandarin is spoken as the native language by
roughly 850 million people, basically in Northern and
Southwestern China, and is an official language in the
People’s Republic of China (P. R. China), Taiwan, and Singa-
pore. Cantonese is spoken by roughly 62 million people in
P. R. China, Singapore and Malaysia, and is the official lan-
guage of Hong Kong and Macau.
The findings reported here originate from studies con-
ducted with speakers of Mandarin living in the US, in P.
R. China (especially Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shijiazhu-
ang), in Taiwan, and in Singapore, and with speakers of
Cantonese living in Hong Kong and Macau. Notably, with
just one exception, none of these studies was conducted
in an area where Mandarin is the prevailing language (in
Guangzhou this would be Cantonese, in Shanghai Wu, in
Taiwan Min or Hakka, and in Singapore Hoklo). However,
despite its (linguistic) status as one of many Chinese vari-
eties, Mandarin is also an official language and often the
lingua franca in most Chinese-speaking states; it is the vari-
ety on which most writing is based; and the people who
participated in most of the following studies are reported
to be highly fluent in Mandarin.
With regard to spatial frames of reference, speakers of
(Mandarin) Chinese make use of all three major FoRs,
albeit with considerable regional variation (e.g., the prefer-
ence for the absolute FoR is stronger in Northern parts than
in the South; see Li & Zhang, 2009), and they prefer the
translational variant of the relative FoR over the reflective
one (Beller et al., 2014).
For most of their history, the two Chinese languages
under scrutiny here were written in vertical columns
top-to-bottom (TB), ordered from right-to-left (RL). This
has gradually changed in recent decades and to a diverging
extent: Whereas in Taiwan, the traditional direction is still
also used, writing in mainland China nowadays almost
exclusively follows the Western pattern LR and TB
(Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013),
and the same is true for Singapore (Miles et al., 2011). In
contrast to Mandarin, Cantonese has no conventionalized
writing and is largely used for informal communication.
Direction of writing in Hong Kong and Macau is domi-
nantly LR, followed by TB, whereas RL (which was domi-
nant between the 1920s and 1950s), is nowadays
exceedingly rare (de Sousa, 2012).
In addition to the vertical direction of writing and read-
ing, Mandarin also makes systematic and frequent use of
vertical metaphors for space–time mapping. In line with
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
the ‘river model’ of time, earlier times and the past are said
to be ‘‘up’’, whereas later times and the future are ‘‘down’’
(Scott, 1989; Yu, 1998).
Which of these two aspects affects metaphorical
construals of time, if indeed either of them does so, is a
matter of ongoing controversy. The point of origin for this
controversy was a publication by Boroditsky (2001), who
argued that the availability of vertical metaphors in
Mandarin (in contrast to English, which almost exclusively
uses horizontal spatial metaphors) affects temporal rea-
soning. In a priming paradigm, participants had to work
on two spatial judgment tasks, followed by a temporal
judgment task. The former consisted of questions on the
relation between two objects, arranged either horizontally
or vertically, whereas the latter consisted of questions on
the spatial relationship between two temporal entities
(such as ‘‘March comes earlier than April: true or false?’’).
The spatiotemporal condition used the terms ‘‘before’’
and ‘‘after’’, whereas the purely temporal condition used
‘‘earlier’’ and ‘‘later’’. In the spatiotemporal condition, both
English- and Mandarin-speaking participants were faster
after the horizontal than after the vertical spatial primes.
The same was true in the temporal condition for the Eng-
lish speakers, whereas the Mandarin speakers showed
the reversed pattern, being faster after the vertical primes.
This latter finding was taken as support for the claim that
Mandarin speakers conceptualize time vertically, whereas
English speakers do so horizontally. This is only partly
motivated, however, by the usage of vertical metaphors
in addition to, but not instead of, horizontal metaphors in
Mandarin. Mandarin speakers should therefore be more
sensitive to vertical priming than English speakers (but
about as likely to respond to vertical as to horizontal
priming).
Controversy arose when subsequent studies reported
difficulties in replicating these findings (Chen, 2007;
Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; January & Kako, 2007; Tse &
Altarriba, 2008; for successful replications and extensions,
see Boroditsky, 2008; Boroditsky et al., 2011; Fuhrman
et al., 2011; Miles et al., 2011; for a recent review on the
debate, see Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; an overview of the
main findings is provided in Table 10). The first generation
of these studies was concerned with the cross-linguistic
comparison and with questions pertaining to the degree
of linguistic relativity involved. They were therefore
focused on the dimension of space–time mapping and
remained oblivious to questions of its direction. This
Table 10
Relation of vertical (v) to horizontal (h) conceptions of time in English and Mandarin.
Type of task
Language elicitation with priming
Participants’ Boroditsky January and Chen Tse and
language (2001) Kako (2007) (2007) Altarriba
(2008)
English v<h v=h (v = h) v>h
Mandarin v>h – v=h v>h
Note. The data summarized here show whether effects were stronger or weaker for vertical (v) than for horizontal (h) primes or arrangements, or whether
they were basically equal.
369
section of the current article is confined to findings for Chi-
nese and pays specific attention to those studies that are
informative on both dimension and direction.
Findings with Mandarin speakers in the US (whose
country of origin and native language is unclear) indicate
a preference for the lateral axis LR, accompanied by a sec-
ondary preference for the vertical axis UD in an open
design (Boroditsky, 2008), and activation of both axes in
a congruency priming task (Boroditsky et al., 2011). Similar
effects, by and large, are reported for Mandarin speakers in
Singapore (Miles et al., 2011) and Taiwan (Bergen & Chan
Lau, 2012; Boroditsky, 2008; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013,
although the latter found no evidence of an LR congruency
effect).
In contrast, findings for Mandarin speakers from P. R.
China remain mixed: indicating an LR preference over TB
[= FB] in an open design (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012), UD
(over LR) in one congruency priming task (Fuhrman et al.,
2011) and exclusively LR in another congruency priming
task (Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013).
A mix of reasons may contribute to this mix of findings,
one clearly being regional variations. No two studies were
conducted with the same language community, as indi-
cated in the introduction to this section: Some studies
included mixed samples of Chinese emigrants to the US
(Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Boroditsky, 2008; Boroditsky
et al., 2011); others were conducted in Shijiazhuang in
Hebei province (Bender et al., 2010), in Guangzhou, where
Cantonese is dominant (Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013), in
Shanghai, where Wu prevails (Fuhrman et al., 2011), in Tai-
wan (Boroditsky, 2008; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013), and in
Singapore (Miles et al., 2011), respectively. As noted above,
preferences for frames of reference may vary within the
same country (Li & Zhang, 2009), and different traditions
in writing and reading in some of these places may also
affect the way in which people represent temporal rela-
tions (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Boroditsky et al., 2011;
Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; de Sousa, 2012).
Matters may be complicated further by the fact that,
what is labeled ‘‘horizontal’’ and ‘‘vertical’’ in this discus-
sion, often conflates two dimensions: horizontal the sag-
ittal and lateral dimension, especially in the stimuli used
in the earlier studies (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001), and vertical
the sagittal and genuinely vertical dimension, especially
in the response modes in some of the later studies
(e.g., Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Chen & O’Seaghdha,
2013). In these latter cases, ‘‘vertical’’ does not refer to
3D Implicit task with congruency priming
pointing
Boroditsky Boroditsky Fuhrman Miles Chen and
(2008) et al. (2011) et al. (2011) et al. O’Seaghdha
(2011) (2013)
v<h v<h v<h v<h v<h
vh v=h v=h v=h v < h (Chin.)
v > h (Taiw.)
370 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
the upright orientation people typically adopt, but to the
plane in which sheets of paper or computer keyboards
are placed. The resulting ‘‘top/bottom’’ (TB) classification
therefore usually translates into ‘‘front/back’’ (FB) or even
only ‘‘further/nearer’’ (FN) along the sagittal axis in ‘real
space’, which may be more relevant than previously
assumed: Data collection with the Wednesday’s meeting
question reveals a preference for the FB direction along
the sagittal axis, with ‘‘forward’’ being mapped onto a
pastwards movement (Bender et al., 2010). Findings from
spatial layout tasks are at least compatible with, if not
indicative of, the same FB (rather: FN) direction
(Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Miles et al., 2011), and the
same is true for some of the congruency priming tasks
(Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; Miles et al., 2011). Not com-
patible with a sagittal interpretation are the data
reported in Boroditsky (2008) and Fuhrman et al.
(2011), who used open formats or offered response
modes in 3D (Boroditsky et al., 2011, had no sagittal
option available). As long as only writing direction is
assumed to affect temporal representations (as in the
case of Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012), this conflation of ver-
tical on paper and vertical in real space does not hamper
consistent argumentation. If, however, genuinely vertical
(‘‘up/down’’) space–time metaphors are a possible candi-
date for affecting temporal representations, these two
dimensions need to be distinguished.
The influence of writing direction itself also remains
disputed. Four studies explicitly addressing this question
report convincing evidence in favor of such an influence:
de Sousa (2012) found generational differences in tempo-
ral representations as a function of changes in the direction
of Chinese writing in past decades; Bergen and Chan Lau
(2012) found spatial layouts in line with the prevailing
(and distinct) writing directions in China versus Taiwan;
and Boroditsky et al. (2011) as well as Chen and
O’Seaghdha (2013) found the same pattern for congruency
priming. In contrast, two studies report strong vertical pat-
terns also for speech communities where Chinese is writ-
ten LR (Fuhrman et al., 2011, Exp. 1; Miles et al., 2011).
Apparently, writing direction is a powerful factor, but most
likely not the only one to have an impact on temporal
representations.
6.4. Tongan
Tongan is an Austronesian language spoken in the Poly-
nesian Kingdom of Tonga, a small island group in the
Southwest Pacific. Its (approx. 140,000) speakers make
use of all three basic FoRs for spatial descriptions: For
small-scale (and static as well as dynamic) settings, they
prefer the intrinsic FoR and the relative FoR in its transla-
tional variant (Beller et al., 2014; Bender et al., 2012;
Bennardo, 2000, 2009); for large-scale settings, they prefer
the absolute FoR, which, depending on context, may be
based on a radial land/sea axis or on cardinal directions
(Bennardo, 2000, 2009).
Linguistic overlap for space and time is considerable
(Bender et al., 2005). In line with the range of FoRs pre-
ferred for space, Tongan speakers are also reported to
respond in linguistic elicitations with the Wednesday’s
meeting task (see Section 5.1.1) in a variety of ways:
25.0% of responses reflect an absolute t-FoR, 36.7% an
intrinsic t-FoR, and 30.8% the translation subtype of the
relative t-FoR (Bender et al., 2010). Although the latter
was predominantly chosen by the older generation and
may thus be moribund, it attests to the possibility of such
relative FoRs.
6.5. Yupno and Yélî Dnye
Yupno and Yélî Dnye are both categorized as Papuan
languages, but are not related to each other. Yupno is spo-
ken by 5000 people in the Finisterre Range in northeastern
Papua New Guinea, whereas Yélî Dnye is an isolated
language spoken by the 5000 inhabitants of Rossel Island,
off the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea.
Speakers of Yupno prefer an absolute FoR for spatial
descriptions on different scales, based on the topographic
contrasts uphill/downhill, co-located with the source and
mouth of the Yupno river (Wassmann, 1994). Yupno has
isolated expressions for mapping spatial conceptualiza-
tions on time, but not in a systematic manner (Núñez
et al., 2012). Despite this low degree of linguistic mapping,
data on co-speech gesture (Section 5.2) indicate a transfer
of referencing preferences. Gestural production while
explaining temporal expressions reveal systematic spatial-
ization of time: towards the ground indicating the present
(or deictic center, which is spatially co-located with the
speaker), downhill indicating the past, and uphill the future.
This pattern, albeit deictically anchored in the speaker and
his or her subjective present, is claimed to be largely allo-
centric and thus indicative of the same absolute FoR that is
preferentially used in space (Núñez et al., 2012).
Speakers of Yélî Dnye prefer an absolute (or geocentric)
FoR for spatial descriptions, based on a combination of the
mountain/sea axis with an East/West axis. They also make
use of a body-based intrinsic FoR and to some extent even
of a relative FoR (Levinson, 2006). Co-speech gesture is
geocentrically anchored and geographically accurate
(Levinson & Majid, 2013), and this partly constrains ges-
tures on time. Spatial locations are recruited only when
referring to the position of the sun or moon (other repre-
sentations include gestures along the East/West axis and
along a vertical axis with downwards denoting here and
now, in contrast to upwards for a distant point in time).
The basic concept of time is described as cyclical with-
out calendrical fixed points, and the language possesses a
rich system for the grammaticalization of time. Linguistic
space–time mapping, however, is limited, and data collec-
tion with the time arrangement tasks (see Section 5.3.4)
did not yield systematic patterns, either in the card arrang-
ing task or in the more abstract (2D) time-points task. The
slight majority for relative responses (prevailingly left-to-
right) is most likely due to the fact that those who partic-
ipated were at least partly literate.
6.6. Kuuk Thaayorre (Pormpuraaw settlement)
Kuuk Thaayorre is a small Paman language spoken by
Australian Aborigines in the settlement Pormpuraaw (Cape
York Peninsula, Queensland; approx. 250 speakers). For
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
describing locations and movements in space, Kuuk Tha-
ayorre speakers, like the Yupno, prefer the absolute FoR,
invoked by one of six absolute directional root forms that
refer to the four cardinal directions and the north and south
banks of a nearby river. Although systematic data on co-
speech gesture are still lacking, some evidence is reported
for pointing towards the position of the sun for indicating
time, and for pointing eastwards for indicating a distant
past. The very few expressions applicable across domains
consist of one term for both ‘‘place’’ and ‘‘time’’ and one term
encoding both the intrinsic relation ‘‘in front of’’ and tempo-
ral priority (Gaby, 2012). Despite this paucity of linguistic
space–time mappings, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers respond
to the time arrangement tasks (Section 5.3) in line with an
absolute FoR: mapping past to the East and future to the
West (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Gaby, 2012). As the Tha-
ayorre do not speak of future as westwards, this might be
regarded as another example of how the idea of absolute ref-
erences is transferred from space to time.
6.7. Aymara
Aymara is one of the two languages that make up the
Aru (or Jaqi) family, which—besides Quechua—is one of
the two dominant language families of the central Andes
in South America. Aymara is spoken by approximately
2.8 million people in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. For spatial
descriptions on different scales, Aymara speakers make
preferential use of an absolute FoR, which is based on the
cardinal directions. Interestingly, aligned with this coordi-
nate system is the intrinsic coordinate system emanating
from the body, so that East is mapped onto ‘‘front’’ and
West mapped onto ‘‘back’’. More generally, people, objects,
and land are conceived of as having a canonical orientation
Eastwards, facing the sunrise (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012).
When talking about time, Aymara speakers have been
observed to use both lateral and sagittal gesture: the for-
mer for depicting non-deictic time (i.e., earlier/later rela-
tions), and the latter for deictic time. In deictic gestures,
FRONT is assigned to the past, and BACK to the future. In
previous work, this was related to the VISION-IS-KNOWLEDGE
metaphor and a focus on evidentiality, with what one
can know (because of personal experience) as providing
the basic motivation for the FRONT-to-past mapping
(Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). In the light of the new findings
on preferred spatial orientation (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012),
however, one might also argue that the canonical absolute
orientation towards the sunrise provides the basis for the
FRONT-to-past mapping (as both are located in the East).
6.8. Tzeltal and Yucatec Maya
Tzeltal and Yucatec belong to two different branches of
the Maya language family. Tzeltal is basically spoken in the
highland of Chiapas (Mexico), Yucatec in the lowlands of
the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and northern Belize
(approx. 370,000 and 770,000 speakers, respectively).
For describing locations and movements in space,
neither of these languages makes use of a full-fledged rel-
ative FoR. Tzeltal speakers prefer the absolute (geocentric)
FoR, which derives its orientation from the overall
371
downhill/uphill slope of the land, but they also make use
of a body-based intrinsic FoR and its projections (Brown,
2012; Brown & Levinson, 1992; Levinson & Brown, 1994).
Yucatec speakers, on the other hand, appear to prefer
intrinsic references over absolute ones, based on cardinal
directions (Bohnemeyer & Stolz, 2006; Le Guen, 2011a).
Despite these diverging preferences, however, co-speech
gesture is geocentrically anchored and geographically
accurate in both groups (Brown, 2012; Le Guen, 2011a,
2011b; and see Haviland, 2003, 2005). More importantly,
the two groups differ with regard to space–time mapping.
Tzeltal provides a wide range of spatial expressions that
can be mapped onto time, thus giving rise to a wide range
of temporal representations, which include the following
concepts: (1) deictically anchored (ego-centered) time vec-
tors, (2) deictically anchored static sequences of time peri-
ods, (3) time as change of state or of location along a
unidirectional time line, (4) time as a unidirectional vector
oriented uphill-wards, and (5) cyclic time. The relationship
between the two domains is therefore highly variable, and
only occasionally is the future located according to an
absolute FoR, namely uphill (Brown, 2012).
Data collection with the time arrangement tasks (see
Section 5.3.4) did not yield systematic patterns, either in
the card arranging task or in the (2D) abstract time-points
task. A slight majority in the latter for relative responses
(prevailingly left-to-right, followed by near-to-far) rather
indicates a preference for temporal representations, which
is at odds with preferences for space. With regard to ges-
ture, convergence across domains appears to be stronger:
In line with the absolute FoR underlying spatial gestures,
Tzeltal speakers routinely point to different positions in
the sky to indicate where the sun would be. Occasionally,
they also point back over the head or shoulder to indicate
the past (Brown, 2012).
In contrast, speakers of Yucatec Maya, who make more
frequent use of an intrinsic FoR in speaking about space
and of an absolute FoR in their co-speech gestures, avoid
mappings of temporal entities onto any distinct space
and thus tend to point towards the ground for the here
and now, and upwards for distant past or future events.
This resistance to cross-domain mappings is also observed
in the time arrangement tasks, in which a substantial num-
ber of participants came up with a piling strategy: bottom-
up, so that the most recent one covers all of the older ones
(Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012).
6.9. Amondawa
Amondawa, finally, is a Kawahib language that belongs
to the Tupí-Guaraní branch of the Tupí family. It is spoken
by approximately 100 people living in the Uru-eu-wau-
wau reservation in Rondônia in Greater Amazonia (Brazil).
Besides documentation of the diverse lexical and construc-
tional repertoire for the conceptualization and expression
of location and spatial motion (Sinha et al., 2011), data
on frames of reference or co-speech gesture were not
collected.
Linguistic analyses show that none of the spatial
expressions is used across domains to situate an event in
relation to a temporal reference point, and no term for an
372 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
abstract notion of time exists. Instead, temporal intervals
such as those belonging to the seasonal and diurnal sys-
tems are expressed by sun-based terms. In three spatial
layout tasks, this lack of space–time mapping at the con-
structional level was further explored. The two calendar
installation tasks (Section 5.3.2) exhibited curvilinear rep-
resentations, likely fitted into working space, which
revealed no clear preference for either left-to-right (LR)
or right-to-left (RL) orientation. The time landscape game
produced expressions like ‘‘The sun/dry season goes’’,
‘‘. . . has passed across’’, or ‘‘. . . is coming’’, or ‘‘The night
is coming behind [the sun]’’ (Sinha et al., 2011, p. 159).
These expressions may be regarded as instantiations of lin-
guistic space–time mappings. However, the authors con-
sider this an unwarranted over-interpretation, as all of
these expressions were elicited in situations that involve
spatial motion (and non-deictic sequences). They conclude,
instead, that Amondawa speakers do not conceptualize
events as occurring in Time as Such, and that they do not
employ expressions for spatial location and motion to con-
struct temporal ones (Sinha et al., 2011).
7. Theoretical implications
One of the main purposes of this review is to scrutinize
the accounts of temporal frames of reference (FoRs) pro-
posed to date in the light of the available empirical data.
More precisely, we intend to investigate whether and
how these data would be interpreted by each of these
accounts, and whether and to what extent they are com-
patible with their theoretical predictions. To this end, we
will now look at the empirical findings with the following
questions in mind: Which properties and concepts of time
are reflected in the observed cultural patterns (Sec-
tion 7.1)? How do they relate to the construct of a mental
time line (Section 7.2)? What do the observed concepts of
time and the culture-specific mental time lines reveal
about the principles of FoR construal and the psychological
reality of the proposed temporal FoRs (Section 7.3)? And to
what extent, and based on which grounds, are spatial FoRs
really mapped onto time (Section 7.4)?
7.1. Properties and concepts of time
In Section 2.1, we discussed the properties of time and
how they may or may not be mapped onto space, and we
identified possible concepts of time. Which of these proper-
ties are preserved, and which concepts are reflected in the
space–time mappings reported for the sixteen languages
described above? While these questions lie at the heart
of our endeavor, they were addressed only indirectly by
the studies reviewed here. Central to most of them is a con-
cern with the mental time line, but, as we try to demon-
strate, respective findings can be used to shed light on
other questions as well.
7.1.1. Spatial and non-spatial properties of time
The properties of time comprise extension, linearity,
directionality, and transience (Galton, 2011). Three of
these are largely preserved when time is spatialized. This
is most obvious for extension: Every spatial representation
extends along at least one dimension. And for all but three
of the examples mustered for this review, temporal data
patterns do indeed reflect this property. Almost all of these
also preserve the properties of linearity and directionality:
Most representations seem to take the shape of a line
and are oriented in one direction (with circles being looped
lines, directed clockwise or counterclockwise). Direction,
in turn, provides the foundation for assigning FRONT and is
thus essential for construing temporal FoRs, as discussed
below (Section 7.3).
One of the cases that provide an exception to the pres-
ervation of spatio-temporal properties is Amondawa. Its
speakers allegedly do not employ expressions for spatial
location and/or motion when constructing temporal
expressions (Sinha et al., 2011). The empirical data seem
to contradict this claim, as they appear to reveal adoption
of the lateral axis for temporal representations, but due to
some of the specifics of the task and the small sample size,
no solid inferences can be drawn. The other exceptions are
Yucatec Maya, whose speakers avoid spatial mappings in
gesture and who do not exhibit consistent patterning in
spatial layout tasks (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012; see
Brown, 2012, for similar observations among Tzeltal
Maya), and Yélî Dnye, for which space–time mapping is
patchy in language, gesture, and behavioral tasks
(Levinson & Majid, 2013). A final exception, which is not
listed above but is recurrent in discussions on this topic,
is Whorf’s claim that the Hopi do not conceptualize time
as anything spatially extended, but as purely temporal:
‘‘Nothing is suggested about time except the perpetual
‘getting later’ of it’’ (1956, p. 143).
Each of these exceptions may serve as instance of a cul-
tural focus on the fourth property of time, its transience,
which implies a change of state and the fleetingness of
each single moment, meaning that it cannot be expressed
spatially in any straightforward way. As most tasks involve
a spatial dimension (especially those on bodily expres-
sions, spatial layout, and congruency priming), empirical
support for the absence of space–time mappings is hard
to obtain—unless speakers shoulder the effort to avoid such
mapping, as the Yucatec Maya appear to do (Le Guen &
Pool Balam, 2012). And yet, even some of the spatial data
indicate transience more than any other property: It is
reflected in the piling-up strategy during card arrange-
ment, especially by Mayan speakers (Brown, 2012; Le
Guen & Pool Balam, 2012), and in gestures that indicate
time by pointing to the corresponding position of the sun
in the sky (Brown, 2012; Gaby, 2012; Levinson & Majid,
2013; Sinha et al., 2011).
7.1.2. Concepts of time
The concepts of time considered here include the linear,
cyclical, and radial concept. As described in Section 2.1.2,
all preserve—at least to some extent—the properties of
extension, linearity, and directionality.
The linear concept is typically considered to be the pre-
vailing concept of time in human thinking, and the data
compiled in Table 9 support this assumption: Spatial lay-
out data reveal, in almost all cases, fairly straight, linear
arrangements; to locate past and future, linguistic phrases
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
employ dichotomous contrasts along a one-dimensional
continuum; gesture and postural sway do the same; and
congruency priming tasks found congruency effects along
the same continua.
The preponderance of the linear concept, however, does
not preclude the existence of other concepts. For instance,
our experience of recurring time periods and cyclical
sequences may also motivate a cyclical concept of time.
In the past, the cyclical concept has typically been associ-
ated with non-Western cultures such as Hinduism
(Sharma, 1974), the Hopi (Malotki, 1983; Whorf, 1956),
Maya (Farriss, 1987; León-Portilla, 1990) or South-Ameri-
can Toba (Klein, 1987)—and has given rise to a fair amount
of controversy. Of the methods reviewed here, only the
documentation of co-speech gesture and some of the spa-
tial layout tasks are suitable for detecting such a cyclical
concept in the first place. Respective data suggest that,
although this concept may not be pervasive, it does exist;
Tzeltal Maya (Brown, 2012) speak of time as cyclical;
Bergen and Chan Lau (2012) report small proportions of
cyclical arrangement of cards in P.R. China (3%) and Taiwan
(8%); and Le Guen and Pool Balam (2012) found instantia-
tions of the cyclical concept among the Yucatec Maya, both
in spatial layout tasks (9%) and in gesture (46%).
Notably, findings like these are not restricted to non-
Western cultures. For instance, Tversky, Kugelmass, and
Winter (1991; see Section 5.3.1) report that 15–40% of
the data for the youngest children and 6–25% for the
older children consisted of nonlinear responses, including
triangular (i.e., circular) instead of linear arrangements.
And Jamalian and Tversky (2012) obtained 24% circular
diagrams (in contrast to 67% linear diagrams) from Eng-
lish-speaking adults in a control condition, and even 67%
circular diagrams in the condition with circular gesture.
The radial (or ego-centric) concept, finally, stresses
asymmetry between proximal and distal events more than
asymmetry between past and future, thus emphasizing—
and in fact presupposing—a deictic center. Radial patterns
in space are far from unusual: They are characteristic of
the relative FoR, with assignment of FRONT either nearer to
Ego (reflection) or further away from Ego (translation),
and even some absolute FoRs are based on radiality, espe-
cially those used on small islands (e.g., Bennardo, 2000,
2009).
But how likely is a radial concept to emerge in the
domain of time? Several pieces of the currently available
data hint at such a possibility, each of which may appear
weak in isolation but gain weight when considered jointly.
Acknowledgement of its feasibility goes back at least to
Traugott (1975, 1978), who defined tense in its simplest
form as the distinction between proximal and distal rela-
tions and thus as symmetrical to the deictic center. The
distinction between past and future requires an additional
step—which is not taken by all languages—namely map-
ping the tense relations onto a time line. Conflation of dis-
tant past and future has also been described for Toba
(Klein, 1987) and Yucatec Maya (Le Guen & Pool Balam,
2012). When confronted with Wednesday’s meeting task,
the majority of (older) speakers of Tongan tend to read
‘‘moved forward’’ as pastwards in the case of a past meet-
ing, and as futurewards in the case of a future meeting
373
(Bender et al., 2010). Such an ‘‘anthropocentric’’ view of
time also shines through in English, with the observer
‘towering’ above both past and future (Radden, 2004).
And the distance effect observed in congruency priming
tasks by Santiago and colleagues (2010; see Section 5.4.6)
demonstrates that proximal scenes are harder to discrimi-
nate from a reference scene than distal scenes—in either
direction, regardless of past or future.
It should also be noted that some of the data reported as
evidence for a linear concept do not really allow a decision to
be made between a linear and a radial concept, as the
adopted axis begins or ends in Ego. This holds especially
for data on the vertical (top/bottom) axis that should be
more accurately coded as nearer/further (Bergen & Chan
Lau, 2012; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; Tversky et al., 1991).
The nearer/further axis is also employed in Tzeltal and Yuca-
tec Mayan (Brown, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012).
7.2. The mental time line
Recent years have seen accumulating evidence for the
proposition that people process a variety of abstract infor-
mation such as number, size, speed, or time by mapping it
onto a linear spatial representation (Walsh, 2003). The
mental time line, a construct widely discussed in this
domain, is assumed to extend in a more or less spatial
manner, along one dimension, in one direction, and poten-
tially ad infinitum. This notion reflects three of the four
properties of time, namely extension, linearity, and direc-
tionality, and is compatible with a linear concept of time.
As detailed in the previous subsection, however, some
of the observed representations are at odds with the time
line construct and indicate that it may not be universal
(the same has been claimed for the related mental number
line; see Bender & Beller, 2011; Núñez, 2008, 2011; Núñez,
Doan, & Nikoulina, 2011). The cyclical concept of time pre-
serves the properties of extension, linearity, and direction
only to some extent, namely if transitivity is suspended
(Galton, 2011). And the radial concept entirely precludes
the existence of a single mental time line, as its half-axes
radiate out from the deictic center, thus pointing in dia-
metrically opposed directions. Even those data, however,
that do support the mental time line construct exhibit
remarkable variation, and they do so with regard to (i)
the number of available different time lines, (ii) their
dimension and direction, and (iii) their anchoring.
7.2.1. Number of time lines
Apparently, most people do not possess exactly one
time line. Some, like the Yucatec Maya or Amondawa, are
claimed to possess none at all (Le Guen & Pool Balam,
2012; Sinha et al., 2011), while others appear to have at
least two (Miles et al., 2011) or even three, if one takes
the data from Mandarin speakers (compiled in Table 9)
as evidence for alternative recruitment of the sagittal, lat-
eral, and vertical axis.
7.2.2. Dimension and direction of the time line
Variability is also profound with regard to the preferred
axis and direction of the time line. One of the first investi-
gations into space–time mappings found an LR preference
374 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
in English, but the reverse in Arabic and Hebrew speakers
(Tversky et al., 1991). Ever since then it has been assumed
by psychologists—and recurrently demonstrated for a num-
ber of languages—that the mental time line basically
unfolds along the lateral axis (e.g., Ouellet et al., 2010a,
2010b; Santiago et al., 2007, 2010; Ulrich & Maienborn,
2010; Weger & Pratt, 2008). This assumption contrasted
sharply with the linguistic emphasis of the sagittal axis
(again across a range of languages), supported by data on
bodily expressions (Miles et al., 2010) and from congruency
priming tasks that permitted sagittal responses (e.g.,
Torralbo et al., 2006; Ulrich et al., 2012). Evidence for the
third dimension along the vertical axis comes from speak-
ers of Chinese languages (Tables 9 and 10).
Interestingly, the direction of time lines is not conven-
tionalized to the same extent for all three dimensions. The
direction of the lateral axis appears to be non-controversial,
as it basically corresponds to the prevailing writing direc-
tion (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet et al., 2010b;
Tversky et al., 1991). The vertical axis appears to be pointing
uniformly downwards (UD). The two instances of upwards
direction (DU) reported in Table 9 (i.e., Tzeltal and Yucatec
Maya) are convincingly explained as representations of
temporal transience rather than spatial orientation
(Brown, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012). Only the sagit-
tal axis may be oriented both ways (FB or BF), within and
across speech communities, as attested to in linguistic tasks
(e.g., Clark, 1973; McGlone & Harding, 1998; Rothe-Wulf,
Beller, & Bender, 2014) and co-speech gesture (Casasanto
& Jasmin, 2012)—likely a reflection of the two complemen-
tary perspectives on time (ME and MT).
In at least four of the cases compiled in Table 9, how-
ever, none of these dimensions appears to be relevant for
the time line. Instead, speakers recruit geographical coor-
dinates for its construals: the inclination of the landscape,
with uphill/downhill contrasts as in Tzeltal Maya (Brown,
2012), the flowing direction of a prominent river as in
Yupno (Núñez et al., 2012) and other Papuan languages
(Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012), or the course of the sun from
East to West as in Thaayorre (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010;
Gaby, 2012), Yélî Dnye (Levinson & Majid, 2013), and per-
haps Aymara (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser,
2006). This raises the question of where the time line is
anchored, or grounded.
7.2.3. Anchoring and grounding: Egocentric versus allocentric
time lines
A time line may be classified as egocentric if it is anchored
in Ego (i.e., it takes the speaker as the reference point or deic-
tic center), whereas an allocentric time line has its origin in
an entity distinct from Ego. In this sense, postural sway dur-
ing a mental time travel into one’s own past or future clearly
reveals an egocentric time line (Miles et al., 2010). The
speech balloon task with a person’s head as the reference
point, in contrast, reveals an allocentric time line (Torralbo
et al., 2006). In a similar fashion, some of the spatial layout
tasks provide a reference point outside the speaker
(Boroditsky et al., 2008; Tversky et al., 1991), and so do some
of the congruency priming tasks (Miles et al., 2011; Torralbo
et al., 2006; Ulrich et al., 2012).
A related, yet broader distinction based on grounding
principles is proposed by Núñez and colleagues (2012).
They classify a time line as egocentric if it is grounded in
the asymmetries of the conceptualizing Ego (such as
back/front, up/down, or left/right), whereas an allocentric
time line is grounded in the superordinate field.
Interestingly, only very few data patterns unequivocally
attest to a time line that extends literally through the
speaker: linguistic mapping on front/back vocabulary (e.g.,
McGlone & Harding, 1998), some gestures that explicate
backward as over the head or shoulder (Brown, 2012;
Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), and
forward/backward postural sway (Miles et al., 2010). As in
most of these cases representations were linked to partici-
pants’ subjective past or future, the egocentric nature of
these representations is beyond question. The only other
type of representations for which this is the case is that
based on the radial concept of time, which is egocentric by
definition.
On the other end of the spectrum, Yupno and Kuuk Tha-
ayorre (as well as, to some extent, Yélî Dnye, Tzeltal and
Aymara) provide examples for temporal construals that
are undoubtedly allocentric. Regardless of how the speaker
is oriented, his or her time line is oriented towards a dis-
tinct, external coordinate such as East/West or down-
stream/upstream (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Núñez et al.,
2012; and see Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012). It happens to
pass through Ego, but is not emanating from it.
For the bulk of data, however, this classification is not
easy to make. As time is one-dimensional, thus comprising
the speaker in each stream of events, even time lines that
are not egocentric likely appear to be so. Most studies com-
piled in this review take the participant as point of origin.
It may thus be a mere artifact that time line representa-
tions appear to be egocentric at all. The question of how
accurate it is to classify a mental time line as egocen-
tric—simply because it comprises the speaker—is related
to the question discussed above (in Sections 2.2.2 and
4.1) of whether the ME and MT perspective are indeed nec-
essarily ego-centered or simply happen to include Ego, and
thus has a direct bearing on FoR assignment as will be
detailed in the next section.
7.3. Temporal frames of reference
Section 2.2.3 introduced the notion of frames of refer-
ence (FoRs) as one possibility for structuring spatio-tempo-
ral representations, and Section 3 presented a range of
diverging theoretical accounts that are based on this
notion. This current section is devoted to the question of
how the empirical data may inform the evaluation of these
accounts, by discussing (i) what the observed concepts of
time and the culture-specific mental time lines reveal
about the principles of FoR construal and assignment of
orientation, (ii) how they speak to the psychological reality
of the proposed temporal FoRs, and (iii) whether they sup-
port a fundamental role for deixis.
7.3.1. Principles of FoR construal and FRONT assignment
As detailed above, the three basic FoRs—absolute, intrin-
sic, and relative—are construed (and can be distinguished)
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
largely on the basis of the following principles: The abso-
lute and intrinsic FoR describe binary relations (between
figure F and ground G), the relative FoR a ternary relation
(between F, G, and observer’s viewpoint V); and orientation
is derived in the case of the absolute FoR from the superor-
dinate field (outside F and G), in the case of the intrinsic FoR
from G, and in the case of the relative FoR from V. As a con-
sequence, the relative FoR tends to be egocentric, and the
other two tend to be allocentric.
The possible concepts of time relate to these principles
in two ways. First, both the linear and the cyclical concept
are one-dimensional and unidirectional representations of
time that, from a mathematical point of view, require only
two points for precise definition. In other words, they
afford construal of binary relations and thus an absolute
or intrinsic FoR (and are therefore unlikely to be Ego-cen-
tered). The radial concept, on the other hand, not only
introduces a deictic center, but also presupposes its con-
sideration for establishing the ternary relation between
three points (whether F is in front of G depends on where
exactly V is in relation to F and G). In this sense, only the
radial concept affords a relative FoR. Second, the concepts
of time also provide orientation for the construal of FoRs:
Whereas the radial concept defines Ego as the deictic cen-
ter, thereby establishing the subjective perspective
required for a relative FoR, the direction assigned to the
linear (and, to some extent, the cyclical) concept reflects
the conceptualization of where time is generally flowing
to, thus bestowing an orientation upon the superordinate
field required for an absolute FoR (this argument corre-
sponds to the proposition above that neither the ME nor
MT perspective presuppose a deictic center, but reflect
more general perspectives on time, and thus do not qualify
as instances of a relative FoR).
Accordingly, orientation of the relative FoR is easy to
establish, as it simply derives from the deictic center of
the radial concept (typically the speaker). In line with the
arguments put forward for the existence of a radial concept
of time (Section 7.1.2), the following cases could be
enlisted as examples of a relative FoR: languages with
proximal/distal distinction only (Traugott, 1975, 1978),
the conflation of (distant) past and future in Toba and
Yucatec Maya (Klein, 1987; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012),
indications of an anthropocentric perspective on time in
English and in French generational terms (Radden, 2004),
and the symmetrical forward movement of dates away
from now in Tongan (Bender et al., 2010). All of these cases
attest to the possibility of relative FoRs in the domain of
time—contrary to claims by Moore (2011) and Tenbrink
(2011), but in line with the accounts of Kranjec (2006)
and Zinken (2010). These cases also afford, at least in prin-
ciple, the two variants reflection and translation as pro-
posed by Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010, 2012): The
French generational terms both for great-grandchildren
and great-grandparents as ‘‘behind’’ (Radden, 2004)
instantiate the reflection variant, and the Tongan moving
pattern away from Ego the translation variant.
Establishing orientation of the absolute and intrinsic
FoR is less straightforward, and more controversial.
In order to be diagnosed as absolute, external coordi-
nates need to be recruited for FoR construal. Some of the
375
cases compiled in Table 9 are obvious candidates for this:
the mapping of past events downhill (or rather down-
stream) and future events uphill (upstream) in Yupno
(Núñez et al., 2012) and, to some extent, Tzeltal (Brown,
2012), and the mapping of past events to East and future
events to West in Kuuk Thaayorre (Boroditsky & Gaby,
2010; Gaby, 2012) and perhaps Aymara (Núñez &
Cornejo, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006).
However, even speakers who do not invoke geographi-
cal coordinates may adopt an absolute FoR, for instance
when aligning their mental time line with the arrow of
time (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Yu, 2012). If time is assumed
to ‘flow’ or ‘fly’ from the past into the future, and speakers
are assumed to be oriented in line with this direction of
time, then assignment of FRONT to the future would count
as an instance of the absolute FoR (as proposed by
Bender et al., 2005, 2010; Kranjec, 2006). Likewise,
arrangement of tokens along the lateral axis from left to
right would count as an instance of the absolute FoR if
the rationale for the arrangement is that the past is located
left on the time axis, and the future towards the right (in
marked contrast to arrangements based on sequential,
anterior/posterior relations, according to which earlier
times should be mapped to the left side). In this sense,
almost all instances of mental time lines would, in fact,
qualify as representations of the same temporal orienta-
tion, with almost all of the cases compiled in Table 9 being
then classified as instantiations of an absolute FoR.
A third possibility put forward by Zinken (2010) is to
consider the superordinate field as being oriented towards
the beginning of temporal intervals and, ultimately, the
beginning of time itself. Adoption of this view appears to
be reflected in FB gestures (as reported by Casasanto &
Jasmin, 2012) and linguistic mapping along the FB axis
(as obtained with the Wednesday’s meeting task).
The intrinsic FoR, finally, is anchored in the ground entity
G and can only be adopted if G is regarded as being oriented.
Crucially, a potential observer may also serve as ground,
which requires the distinction of two cases: anchoring of
the FoR in event G, and anchoring of the FoR in Ego (= G).
Unfortunately, no consensus has been reached as to
whether temporal entities may or may not be regarded as
oriented. This controversy is most explicit for events, but
can also be generalized to the apparently simpler case of
Ego = G. As detailed in Section 4.2.2, some scholars (e.g.,
Tenbrink, 2011; Zinken, 2010) assume that the intrinsic
FRONT in this case is derived from Ego’s looking direction,
which in most cases is futurewards. However, as we argued
above (Section 4.4), what would serve as G in temporal
contexts is not Ego as a person, but his or her subjective
present, and whether this specific moment in time can be
assigned an intrinsic FRONT—and, if so, towards which direc-
tion—depends on the more general question of whether
temporal entities may have an intrinsic FRONT in the first
place. Whereas Tenbrink (2011) claims this to be impossi-
ble, Zinken (2010) is prepared to assign an intrinsic FRONT
at least to temporal intervals, and Bender and colleagues
(2005, 2010) as well as Yu (2012) assign an intrinsic FRONT
(= their ‘‘beginning’’) to all temporal entities. Combinations
of a linear concept with assignment of FRONT to earlier
times—reflected in all cases recruiting the FB axis—thus
376 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
appear to be a likely candidate for the diagnosis of an intrin-
sic FoR.
In any case, the problem remains that different
accounts classify the same patterns as instances of diverg-
ing FoRs. The classification of absolute and intrinsic FoRs
by Tenbrink (2011) and see Moore, 2011, for instance, is
diametrically opposed to that by Kranjec (2006) or
Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010). However, whether
time lines oriented pastwards really reflect adoption of
an absolute FoR and time lines oriented futurewards reflect
adoption of an intrinsic FoR cannot be decided on theoret-
ical grounds, as different speech communities may differ in
the principles on which they base their assignment of ori-
entation. Fortunately, some priming studies explicitly
aimed to test the psychological reality of these FoRs and
may thus shed light on this infelicitous situation.
7.3.2. The psychological reality of temporal FoRs
As mentioned earlier, the Wednesday’s meeting ques-
tion was primarily used to explore the psychological real-
ity of specific perspectives that people are claimed to
take while processing ambiguous temporal phrases. The
perspective under scrutiny is typically primed before par-
ticipants are asked to answer the target question. Of the
accounts described in Section 3, only three attempted to
empirically test the space–time mapping they claim and
the psychological reality of any additional perspective or
FoR predicted by them (details in Section 5.1.3). Two of
them are relevant here.
The reference-point (RP) metaphors account (Núñez
et al., 2006; see Section 3.2) predicts an Ego-free MT [=
intrinsic] perspective (indicative of the ‘‘Time-RP’’ meta-
phor) in contradistinction to the ‘‘Ego-RP’’ metaphor,
which is regarded as consisting of the ME and an Ego-cen-
tered MT perspective. To enforce such an Ego-free MT per-
spective, visual primes were used that foregrounded the
anterior/posterior relation between two events. Compared
to a control condition, this priming significantly shifted
participants’ responses to the earlier date (52% [n = 50] vs.
71% [n = 45 speakers of US English] in Exp. 2; in Exp. 1
without control condition, Monday was chosen by 64%,
n = 66 speakers of US English).
The temporal framework models account (Kranjec, 2006;
see Section 3.3) predicts an additional ‘‘extrinsic’’ [= abso-
lute] FoR. To enforce this FoR, visual primes were used that
foregrounded the superordinate field: In two experiments,
the priming shifted responses to the later date (Friday: 73%,
aggregated across experiments, combined n = 44 speakers
of US English). In contrast, priming them with intrinsic
stimuli (similar to the ones by Núñez et al., 2006) reversed
the pattern (Monday: 61%, n.s.; n = 36 speakers of US
English).
These findings provide empirical support for two
important propositions: First, they do attest to effects of
spatial priming on temporal reasoning and thus to space–
time mapping in the context of references. Second, and
more importantly, they demonstrate that an absolute (spa-
tial) FoR leads to assigning FRONT futurewards, and an
intrinsic FoR leads to assigning FRONT pastwards (in the
direction of earlier events). In other words: The empirical
data support those accounts that classify futureward
movements as an indication of an absolute FoR, and past-
ward movements as an indication of an intrinsic FoR (i.e.,
Bender et al., 2010; Kranjec, 2006; Núñez et al., 2006; see
Table 7). This classification also entails that, of the time
lines compiled in Table 9, those unfolding in LR, BF, and
UD direction are likely to favor the absolute FoR.
7.3.3. The role of deixis
The preponderance of the absolute FoR for temporal
representations across tasks is at odds with the claim that
deictic representations differ fundamentally from non-
deictic representations. As described above, almost all
accounts of temporal FoRs take deixis as their point of
departure. They construe their taxonomies from the basic
distinction between expressions that do (A-series) or do
not (B-series) entail Ego as a deictic center. Quite fre-
quently, deictic A-series expressions are equated with a
relative temporal FoR, and with the ME perspective—as
this appears to also presuppose a deictic center, the (mov-
ing) Ego—and, in some accounts, an Ego-centered MT per-
spective. Conversely, non-deictic B-series expressions are
equated with an Ego-free MT perspective, and either with
an intrinsic or absolute temporal FoR. As argued in Sec-
tion 4.1, however, this focus on deixis may obscure the
more complex relations between the A-/B-series classifica-
tion and a FoR-based classification, and may incite hasty
mappings. The crucial role for the unfolding of the time
line and for preferences in temporal references that has
been ascribed to deixis is challenged both on theoretical
and empirical grounds.
Theoretically, deixis reveals only little about the
adopted FoR. Whereas adoption of a relative FoR does pre-
suppose a subjective point of view (typically, although not
necessarily, the speaker), adoption of a non-relative FoR
does not preclude the presence of the speaker. In other
words, descriptions can be non-relative, regardless of
whether Ego is or is not part of the scene. The non-relative
relationship between Monday and Tuesday (as depicted in
Fig. 1 and Table 4), holds regardless of whether one is
aware of or oblivious to the fact that Monday coincides
with Ego’s today. Especially in one-dimensional ‘spaces’
like time, Ego’s alignment with a sequence of events is dif-
ficult to elude. This is nicely illustrated by co-speech ges-
tures, produced by speakers of Yupno, which appear to
be speaker-centered and yet depict a general, non-relative
perspective on time as moving upstream into the future
(Núñez et al., 2012). What counts in terms of the classifica-
tion of a FoR as relative is not whether it reveals the speak-
er’s position, or passes through it, but whether it is
anchored in and emanating from this position.
As a consequence, both the ME and MT perspective on
time may also afford a more general and inherently non-
deictic view on temporal moving: MT reflects a perspective
on time as moving not only towards Ego, but towards tem-
poral entities and events more generally (in most cases past-
wards); and ME reflects a perspective according to which
not only Ego, but temporal entities and events more gener-
ally are moving through time (in most cases futurewards).
For the time being, this account of the temporal perspectives
is afforded by the empirical data on temporal references and
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
space–time mappings, but whether it will stand up to more
conclusive scrutiny remains an open question.
Empirical data that could illuminate the role of deixis
are scarce and ambiguous. Some studies seem to confirm
that mental representations may indeed differ substan-
tially depending on whether they refer to deictic or non-
deictic time. Specifically in co-speech gestures, people tend
to recruit the sagittal axis for deictic, and the lateral axis
for non-deictic expressions (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012;
Emmorey, 2002; Núñez et al., 2012). However, the story
must be more complicated, as the very same (deictic) stim-
uli may trigger diverging axis preferences, depending on
other context factors (Torralbo et al., 2006). And con-
versely, both types of stimuli (non-deictic as in the card
arranging task vs. deictic as in the time-points task, Sec-
tion 5.3.4) may yield the same type of results (e.g.,
Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010). It is also worth noting that,
despite the preference for the lateral axis to express
sequence time, this does not involve FRONT-to-past mapping
(as in ‘‘earlier times’’ before ‘‘later times’’), but the opposite
direction (with FRONT in the future direction). In other
words, both sagittal and lateral axis reveal an absolute FoR.
A more comprehensive explanation for the observed
variability across contexts may thus be that speakers of
most languages have more than one axis readily available
for temporal representation and reference, and simply pre-
fer the one that is most compatible with their mindset,
with task specifics, and with contextual factors, which
may—but need not—involve consideration of deictic versus
non-deictic aspects.
7.4. Extent of space–time mapping
If our analysis of FoR construals is correct, then one sur-
prising inference is that the majority of cases compiled in
Table 9 favor adoption of an absolute FoR. Exceptions
include a few cases of refusal to spatialize time at all (i.e.,
Amondawa and Yucatec Maya), a few cases of adopting
the radial concept and concomitantly a genuinely relative
FoR (like Toba and, to some extent, perhaps Yucatec Maya
and older speakers of Tongan), and a few cases of adopting
the intrinsic FoR (as indicated by the occasional occurrence
of the FB time line). Based on this classification, even the
apparently inconsistent responses of Tzeltal Maya
(Brown, 2012) and Yélî Dnye (Levinson & Majid, 2013)
would be considered coherently absolute (except for the
piling-up strategy): LR and NF reflect a lateral and sagittal
line, respectively, aligned to the flow of time, while East/
West and downhill/uphill recruit external coordinates,
but for the same purpose. Instead of inconsistency in pref-
erences for temporal FoRs, the data thus reveal inconsis-
tency in how these temporal FoRs are represented in
space—which may not be as surprising, given the lack of
cultural conventions for space–time mappings.
Despite converging on the absolute FoR, however, a
great deal of diversity is discerned in how these absolute
FoRs are instantiated, and this raises two important ques-
tions: What motivates the specifics of each of these FoRs,
and to what extent do preferences for a specific FoR in
the domain of time reflect preferences in space?
377
7.4.1. Sources for space–time mapping
At least four possible sources for space–time mapping
have been discussed in the literature: cultural artifacts
such as writing direction, linguistic metaphors, embodied
representations of motion, and principles of FoR construal.
Initial research on how spatial representations affect
temporal ones unearthed the importance of cultural arti-
facts: People’s mental time line turned out to be correlated
with the prevailing writing direction (Tversky et al., 1991).
Subsequent studies confirmed this impact of writing direc-
tion (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Casasanto & Bottini, 2010;
Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; de Sousa, 2012; Fuhrman &
Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet et al., 2010b), and hinted at
related factors such as musical notation, the time axis of
graphs, or the design of calendars and clocks10 (Galton,
2011; Jamalian & Tversky, 2012).
That language itself may serve as a principal source for
space–time mappings is as obvious as it is wrong, at least
as a general rule. Adoption of the sagittal axis BF is in line
with respective linguistic metaphors that put the past
behind the speaker and the future ahead. Likewise, an
additional vertical time line in speakers of Mandarin may
(also) be derived from vertical expressions and may be in
place even in the absence of vertical writing (Fuhrman
et al., 2011; Miles et al., 2011). And speakers of Tzeltal
Maya occasionally point to the future as uphill in a way
akin to how they may refer to it verbally (Brown, 2012).
And yet, most non-linguistic data on temporal representa-
tions, at least in the Western world, indicate a lateral axis
LR for which there is no linguistic equivalent (Casasanto
& Jasmin, 2012; Cooperrider & Núñez, 2009). Likewise,
speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre do not speak of the future as
‘‘westwards’’ (Gaby, 2012), and speakers of Yupno do not
really speak of it as ‘‘upstream’’ (Núñez et al., 2012).
An alternative explanation of this preference for the
sagittal axis focuses on embodied representations of
motion and/or vision. When walking, places to be reached
in the future are lying ahead, and previously visited ones
are behind, thus providing strong associations of future
with FRONT, and past with BACK (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012;
Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; and see Miles et al., 2010). Nota-
bly, this imagined motion may also give rise to the
reversed pattern (of mapping FRONT to the past). And in
Aymara, the (known) past is indeed regarded as in front
and the unknown as in back of Ego (Núñez & Sweetser,
2006; for claims of similar FRONT-to-past mappings in Mal-
agasy, Toba, and Maori, see Dahl, 1995; Klein, 1987;
Thornton, 1987, respectively).
A fourth possible source for space–time mappings are
the principles of FoR construals themselves (Bender et al.,
10
If cyclical representations are simply triggered by a cyclical concept of
time, there is no reason to assume a specific direction (clockwise or
counterclockwise); if, however, they are (also) affected by the canonical
direction of clocks, they should be oriented clockwise only. Unfortunately,
not all cyclical concepts found in previous research were systematically
analyzed (e.g., Tversky et al., 1991). The available data, however, support
the assumption: Cyclical representations produced by Chinese participants
are oriented exclusively clockwise (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012), whereas
those produced by (non-literate) Yucatec Maya exhibit an almost equal
number of clockwise and counterclockwise directions (Le Guen & Pool
Balam, 2012).
378 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
2010), which appear to highlight the exact same external
coordinates for the absolute references among speakers
of Kuuk Thaayorre (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Gaby,
2012), Yupno (Núñez et al., 2012), or—albeit to a lesser
extent—Tzeltal Maya (Brown, 2012).
Alternative availability of these different sources for
space–time mappings may be what allows people to adopt
more than one such representation in parallel (e.g., Miles
et al., 2011; Torralbo et al., 2006). It also explains why
the direction of time lines is not conventionalized to the
same extent for all three dimensions, with the lateral and
vertical axis being significantly more uniform than the sag-
ittal axis (which may be oriented both ways, FB or BF,
within and across speech communities).
Importantly, most of these sources favor an absolute
FoR: The mental time line fostered by the prevailing writ-
ing direction, a substantial number of linguistic metaphors,
and people’s looking direction and imagined motion all
more or less reflect (or are aligned to) the general flow of
time, thus foregrounding the orientation of the superordi-
nate field (Table 11). The only source that does not seem to
favor one particular FoR over any other are the principles
of FoR construal. These would predict that, whatever FoR
people prefer in one domain should also be preferred in
the other (Bender et al., 2010). Is this prediction confirmed
by the data?
7.4.2. Degree of space–time mapping
Based on the assumption that (unidirectional) mental
time lines attest to an absolute FoR, we re-coded the data
from Table 9, and contrasted them with preferences for
spatial FoRs where available. Results are summarized in
Table 11.
The mere fact that absolute FoRs appear to prevail in the
languages under scrutiny already hints at the conclusion
that FoR preferences may not carry over from space to time.
In only very few of these cases (including Yupno, Yélî Dnye,
Thaayorre, and to some extent the two Maya groups) do
speech communities favor the absolute FoR in small-scale
space; more often, they prefer the relative and/or intrinsic
FoR. Given the somewhat tentative classification of tempo-
ral representations as instantiations of one or another FoR,
however, this inference may be too hasty. Furthermore, the
Table 11
Evidence for preferred FoRs in space (s-FoR) and time (t-FoR), based on findings as reported in Section 6 and Table 9 (for classification of patterns into FoRs, see
previous subsection).
Note. The following abbreviations are used: A = absolute, I = intrinsic, and R = relative FoR; subscript letters indicate the type of representation, for which
this FoR is preferred (G = gesture, L = linguistic, nd = non-deictic, d = deictic). Preferred FoRs are printed bold-faced; FoRs in brackets are possible, but rarely
used; entries in gray indicate likely, but unconfirmed preferences; shaded cells indicate lacking data.
flexibility of temporal representations depending on task
design, material, and other context factors—together with
a similar flexibility of FoR adoption in spatial tasks—forbids
simple comparisons across diverse tasks.
An explicit empirical assessment of cross-domain con-
sistency in FoR adoption has only been attempted by a
small number of studies to date. The authors of the t-FoR
account (Bender et al., 2005, 2010; see Section 3.6), which
distinguishes four different FoRs, assumed that—specifi-
cally in the case of the two relative FoR variants—prefer-
ences should carry over from space to time. Comparing
speakers of US English, German, Mandarin, and Tongan in
a language elicitation study with the Wednesday’s meeting
task, they found a substantial proportion of relative FoR
adoption in only one of the languages under scrutiny (i.e.,
among older speakers of Tongan), and the variant used in
time (i.e., translation) was identical to the one preferred
in space (Bennardo, 2000). For the other three languages,
the observed temporal FoRs were not incompatible with
those available for space, but did not reflect the preferred
ones either (Bender et al., 2010). A follow-up study
attempted to bring the spatial condition more in line with
the temporal one by replacing the static task with a task on
object movements. Still, responses from speakers of the
same four languages did not indicate cross-domain consis-
tency in FoRs. Notably, correlation between spatial and
temporal FoRs among the US participants, who had worked
on both tasks sequentially, was close to zero (Bender et al.,
2012). And finally, Rothe-Wulf and colleagues (2014; see
Section 5.1.3) tested with speakers of US English, Swedish,
and German whether adoption of a temporal FoR could be
primed by spatial FoRs. They found that only a minor pro-
portion of speakers of only one of the three languages
under scrutiny seemed to be susceptible to this priming
in the predicted direction.
These findings are compatible with the observation that
speakers do not necessarily base their mapping on the
same principles: While speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre or
Yupno appear to take principles of FoR construal as a ratio-
nale for mapping an absolute FoR from space onto time,
this is obviously not the case with speakers of languages
such as English or German, who prefer a relative FoR in
space, but the absolute FoR in time.
 A. Bender, S. Beller / Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382
8. Conclusion
The conceptual relations of space and time are manifold
and complex. Time and space share four properties to vary-
ing extents. Some of the speech communities included in
this review are reported to emphasize the least shared
property transience and thus to avoid space–time
mappings entirely. Most others, however, use spatialized
representations of time that exhibit the shared properties
extension, linearity, and direction. These representations
reflect three different spatial concepts of time (most fre-
quently the linear concept, but occasionally also the cycli-
cal or radial concept), which favors the selection of a
specific temporal FoR by defining a coordinate system, its
anchoring, and its orientation.
Unfortunately, theoretical accounts on temporal FoRs
diverge broadly in how they conceptualize and distinguish
temporal FoRs—depending, for instance, on what may
count as the superordinate field, whether events may have
an intrinsic FRONT, or how a deictic center may affect refer-
encing patterns. Of the thirty studies scrutinized for con-
firming or disconfirming evidence, only very few address
this issue directly. They suggest that the absolute FoR does
derive its orientation from concepts such as the arrow of
time, to which the mental time line is aligned in almost
all cases. The intrinsic FoR, in contrast, is anchored in a
temporal interval or event serving as ground that derives
its orientation from assignment of FRONT to the beginning
of temporal intervals and events or from the anteriority/
posteriority relation inherent in their sequence. While
these two FoRs are fostered by the linear or cyclical con-
cept, the relative FoR is compatible with a radial concept
only: It presupposes a subjective viewpoint (or deictic cen-
ter) and pertains to ternary relations.
Based on this classification, the empirical data, with few
exceptions, suggest a preponderance of the absolute FoR in
the temporal domain, but also attest to an amazing variety
in how this FoR is instantiated. To assign orientation to the
superordinate field, some speech communities recruit
external (allocentric) coordinates such as the position of
the sun or the gradient of landscape or rivers, while others
use the arrow of time in a more abstract manner. This is
reflected in a variety of dimensions and directions, along
which the mental time line unfolds: sagittally BF or FB
(in line with the direction of looking and moving), laterally
LR or RL (depending on writing direction), vertically UD
(triggered variably by writing direction and/or perhaps lin-
guistic metaphors), and even cyclically in either of two
directions (depending on familiarity with clocks). In con-
trast to the FoRs based on geographical coordinates, these
time lines might appear to be egocentric as they comprise
the speaker and are construed relative to his or her posi-
tion. As argued above, however, even these time lines
should be considered allocentric in the sense that their ori-
entation is derived from the direction into which time
‘flows’ rather than from a subjective perspective of the
speaker. To assess the validity of this proposal, more sys-
tematic and empirical research is imperative.
The diversity in time lines, which reveal the tendency to
spatialize time, reflects the flexibility with which this can
379
be achieved—not only across speech communities, but also
within them, and even within individual speakers. The
actual shape of the time line (if one is adopted at all) seems
to depend on contextual factors, task specifics, and mind-
set. This flexibility is less surprising, if one considers that
time is not only one-dimensional and unidirectional, but
also orthogonal to all spatial dimensions. Which spatial
dimension is actually adopted to convey the flow of time
therefore does not really matter, as long as its basic prop-
erties are preserved. The fact that this may request compli-
ance to cultural conventions, in order to be understood in
the intended sense, explains why explicit tendencies are
found in some speech communities and for some dimen-
sions, but not others.
The preponderance of the absolute FoR in the temporal
domain (at least in the data compiled here) contrasts shar-
ply with a more diverse pattern in the spatial domain. Only
a small number of studies found cross-domain consistency
in FoR adoption, but this is typically the case in those
speech communities with an almost exclusive preference
for the absolute spatial FoR. Does this devalue our efforts
to systematize the mapping of spatial frames of reference
onto time, which motivated this review? We are convinced
that, on the contrary, the conclusions of our review render
such an endeavor even more essential. Not only do infor-
mative cross-domain comparisons presuppose a consistent
and comprehensive mapping of FoR taxonomies; without
consensus on what exactly may count as a frame of refer-
ence, according to which principles they should be defined
and construed, and how respective data should be inter-
preted, this field of research will not advance, and will be
unable to contribute to fundamental theoretical questions
on temporal cognition.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this article took place during our stay at
the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the Uni-
versity of Bielefeld and was supported by a Heisenberg Fel-
lowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG
(Be 2451/8-1,2) to Andrea Bender and by a grant from the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG for the project on
‘‘Spatial referencing across languages: Cultural preferences
and cognitive implications’’ to Andrea Bender and Sieghard
Beller (Be 2451/13-1, Be 2178/7-1). We are indebted to Sus-
anne Bubser for support with the literature, to Gunter Senft
for valuable comments on a previous version of the paper,
and to Sarah Mannion de Hernandez for proofreading. This
paper is dedicated to Melissa Bowerman, in appreciation of
her scientific support and personal friendship.
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