Allocation bias in past and future words

The mental timeline (MTL) refers to the conceptual association between time and horizontal space, such that past and future are linked to left and right, respectively. The present study investigated whether the MTL metaphor-congruency effect would be observed using a word allocation task (WAT), in which participants freely positioned past- and future-related words within a rectangular frame. The results showed that future words were placed significantly further to the right than past words, supporting the presence of the MTL metaphor-congruency effect in a voluntary, unconstrained task. Additionally, handedness did not significantly modulate this effect; it is possible that the MTL operates through a mechanism distinct from the body-specificity hypothesis. These findings suggest that the WAT is a viable paradigm for investigating spatial metaphors and that the MTL may be more readily involved with voluntary and controlled processing than automatic processing.