Growing evidence points to a bidirectional relationship between spatial distance and level of mental representation, whereby distant (vs. near) events are represented by a higher level of representation, and higher levels of representations increase ...

This article investigates the interplay between darkness, construal level, and psychological distance based on the link between environmental lighting conditions and visual perception. In the dark, visual perception becomes less focused and detailed, ...

Why do people use spatial language to describe social relationships? In particular, to what extent do they anchor their thoughts about friendship in terms of space? Three experiments used drawing and estimation tasks to further explore the conceptual ...

The present study evaluates whether in schizophrenia deficits in specifying social distances appropriately for interindividual interactions might be related to abnormal capabilities in specifying the boundaries of reachable space. Using a stop-distance ...

Earlier research () showed that power is represented in vertical space: powerful = up and powerless = down. We propose that power is not simply structured in space in absolute terms, but that relational differences in power moderate the ...

The present study shows how directional movement is related to meaning. We measured the influence of congruent versus incongruent movement – meaning pairings on reaction times in a Stroop-type categorization task. Movement-related words corresponding to ...

Two distinct spatial metaphors for the passage of time can produce disparate judgments about grieving. Under the object-moving metaphor, time seems to move past stationary people, like objects floating past people along a riverbank. Under the people-...

Participants (N = 567) from six countries (Belgium, Ivory Coast, Italy, Kosovo, Portugal, and Switzerland) drew borders of their own and of neighbor countries on boundary-free maps. It was predicted and found that the tendency to overestimate versus ...

This research examined the influence of directional reading/writing habits on the representation of depth in a scene. Participants with English vs. Arabic language backgrounds were asked to represent an imagined scene containing two houses, a “near house” ...

Perceptual bias in simple visuospatial tasks, such as line bisection seen among healthy dextrals, has often been attributed to the hemispheric activation hypothesis. The often reported leftward perceptual bias was explained by an activation of the right ...