Peri-Personal Space and the Representation of Quantity

The representation of locations and movement in peri-personal space (the space directly in front of the torso) has been hypothesized to be important in the representations of abstract concepts, most notably quantity and time. Presumably, spatial and motor response compatibility effects (interactions between stimuli referring to the abstraction, and the spatial location of a response button) are due to shared representations between real space and metaphorical space. However, the bulk of these types of effects are not explained by one general theory as to the re-use of circuits responsible for perception and movement of peri-personal space during representation and comprehension. In this paper, I propose and test the idea that two types of re-use underlie spatial response compatibility effects pertaining to the representation of quantity. To test the idea that two types of re-use are responsible for different sets of spatial-response compatibility effects, I use the same representation domain, quantity, to contrast the directional differences, and directional flexibility (or lack there-of) that each type predicts. Results indicate that semantic understanding of quantity elicits spatial compatibility effects only on the up-down axis, which is the one used in the conceptual metaphor, while tasks that do not tap into the semantic understanding of quantity can adopt the left-right axis as a convenient spatial schematic organizational tool. These results support the conclusion that, 1) space, or at least, spatial representation is used in processing language about quantity and 2) the uses the spatial representations differ, depending on the task.