Is the Onset-Based STEARC Effect Culturally Generalizable? Evidence from a Turkish Sample
This study challenges the cultural generalizability of the onset-based STEARC effect by demonstrating that Turkish participants, despite their left-to-right reading habits, did not exhibit a consistent left-to-right Mental Time Line, suggesting that reading direction alone is insufficient to produce a stable spatial-temporal association across different task conditions.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Time is something we feel constantly, yet we cannot see, touch, or hear it directly. To make sense of it, our brains often borrow tools from other senses, organizing moments along a mental path. In many parts of the world, people naturally arrange this path from left to right, mirroring the way they read text on a page. This mental arrangement is called a "mental time line." When we think of the past, we might picture it on our left; when we think of the future, it appears on our right. Scientists have long believed that this habit of reading shapes how we process time, making us faster to react to "earlier" events with our left hand and "later" events with our right. This connection between space and time is so strong in some cultures that it appears even in simple tasks, like pressing a button when a sound happens sooner or later than expected.
However, the human mind is adaptable, and cultural habits are not always rigid. While most people in the Western world read from left to right, the history of writing in other regions tells a more complex story. In Turkey, for instance, the script changed from right-to-left to left-to-right less than a century ago. This shift raises a fascinating question: does the current way we read our language instantly rewrite our internal map of time, or does the brain hold onto older, deeper patterns? A new study set out to test this by asking Turkish participants to listen to a series of clicks and decide if the final sound arrived too soon or too late. The researchers wanted to see if these listeners would automatically reach for the left side of the table for early sounds and the right side for late ones, just as people in other left-to-right reading cultures do.
The experiment was straightforward but precise. Sixty-one volunteers sat in a quiet room wearing eye masks to block out all visual distractions, ensuring they relied only on their hearing. They listened to a steady rhythm of eight clicks, like a metronome ticking. The first seven clicks happened at a perfectly regular interval. The eighth click, however, was the trick: it arrived either slightly early or slightly late compared to what the listener expected. The participants had to press a button with either their left or right hand to say whether the sound was early or late. Crucially, the rules changed halfway through the experiment. For half the participants, the first set of rules asked them to press the left button for early sounds and the right button for late sounds. For the other half, the rules were reversed. The researchers then measured how quickly people responded to see if their hands moved faster when the button matched the natural flow of time.
The results were surprising and did not show the clear pattern scientists had predicted. When looking at the group as a whole, there was no evidence that Turkish participants were faster to press the left button for early sounds and the right button for late sounds. The expected "mental time line" effect, which has been seen clearly in German and Italian speakers, simply did not appear here. Instead, the speed of their reactions seemed to depend on when they encountered the rules and how much practice they had. Those who started with the "left for early" rules ended up showing a pattern that looked like the opposite of the expected effect, while those who started with the "right for early" rules showed a pattern that looked correct. But when the researchers dug deeper, they found that these patterns were likely not caused by a deep-seated mental map of time. Rather, they were the result of people getting faster at the task as they practiced. The group that started with the "correct" mapping got significantly faster in the second half of the experiment, which accidentally made their responses look like they were following a mental time line. The other group got faster across the board, which created a confusing, reversed pattern.
This suggests that the simple act of reading left-to-right is not enough to guarantee that everyone will organize their sense of time in the same way. The study indicates that the connection between space and time is more fragile and dependent on the specific task than previously thought. In this case, the auditory nature of the test—judging the timing of a sound without seeing any written words or visual timeline—may have been too abstract to trigger the cultural habit of reading. The findings imply that while we can learn to read in a new direction, our brains do not instantly rewire their deepest instincts about how time flows. The mental time line is not a fixed track that everyone runs on; it is a flexible tool that appears only under certain conditions, and for this group of Turkish listeners, the conditions of listening to a rhythm were not enough to bring it out.
Drowning in papers in your field?
Get daily digests of the most novel papers matching your research keywords — with technical summaries, in your language.