Conceptual blending is a mental process that serves a variety cognitive purposes, including human creativity. In this line of thinking, human creativity is modeled as a process that takes different mental spaces as input and combines them into a new mental space, called a blend. According to this form of combinational creativity, a blend is constructed by taking the commonalities among the inpu...

Current evidence provides support for the idea that time is mentally represented by spatial means, as a lateral mental time line. However, available studies have tested only factual events, i.e., those which have occurred in the past or will occur in the future. In the present study we tested whether past and future potential events are also represented along the lateral mental timeline. In Exp...

Recent research on spatial number representations suggests that the number space is not necessarily horizontally organized and might also be affected by acquired associations between magnitude and sensory experiences in vertical space. Evidence for this claim is, however, controversial. The present study now aims to compare vertical and horizontal spatial associations in mental arithmetic. In E...

BACKGROUND The ability to travel mentally through time sets humans apart from many other species, yet little is known about this core cognitive capacity. In particular, what shapes the passage of the mind's journey through time? Guided by the viewpoint that higher cognitive activity can have a sensory-motor grounding, we explored the possibility that mental time travel is influenced by apparent...

Mental representation of numbers is believed to be spatial in nature, with small numbers occupying the left and large numbers the right side of a putative mental number line. Consistent with this, presentation of numbers from the low and high ends of the mental number line induces covert shifts of spatial attention to the left and right side of visual space, respectively. However, the effect of...

During ultra long space missions (i.e. to Mars), the isolated space environment affects a number of physiological, psychosocial and mental processes critically involved in human performance, and it is vital to missions’ success to understand the psychological limits. Past experiences in space have shown that the mental health of a crew can have a great effect on the success or failure of a miss...

We test the robustness of American college students’ mental timeline to dual tasks that have interfered with spatial and verbal reasoning in prior work. We focus on the left-right axis for representing sequences of events. We test American college students, who read from left to right. We test for automatic space-time mappings using two established spacetime association tasks. We find that thei...

This essay offers an explicit application of the mental spaces and blending framework to account for the dynamic nature of meaning construction in a public art museum. The mental spaces and blending framework show great utility for modelling the use of diverse sign systems in specific social and institutional settings. The objects of inquiry are audio presentations on particular paintings, scul...