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The influence of spatial location on temporal order perception

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Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that spatial location impacts temporal order perception, and that the effect of spatial location on temporal order perception varies across cultures. English and Spanish speakers can perceive left-side stimuli occur earlier than right-side stimuli, while native Hebrew speakers do not express this characteristic. Likewise, only a few studies have investigated the effect of spatial location on temporal order perception in Chinese culture, which would be the main aim of this research. In Experiments 1–3, a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, simultaneity judgment (SJ) task, and TOJ-SJ dual-task were used to test the effect of spatial location on temporal order perception. On the horizontal axis, the effect of spatial location on temporal order perception was observed only in the TOJ task, with Mandarin speakers perceiving left-side stimuli occur earlier than right-side stimuli. On the vertical axis, Mandarin speakers consistently perceived the top-side stimuli occur earlier than the bottom-side stimuli in every task. In Experiment 4, an ‘orthogonal’ (location-unrelated) TOJ task was used, where the participants were required to judge the color order that appeared. We also observed the effect of spatial location (top or left) on temporal order perception in this experiment. The results indicated that the effects of spatial location on temporal order perception were robust in both horizontal and vertical directions.

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Correspondence to Xiting Huang.

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Pan, L., Huang, X. The influence of spatial location on temporal order perception. Curr Psychol 43, 2052–2061 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04225-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04225-1

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