Persian Movements: Congruence between script directionality and movement direction & its impact on time perception

Abstract

Li (2014) has shown that congruence between the spatial grounding of time and movement direction leads to faster perception of time passage in Dutch participants. This study was designed to assess whether this effect can be attributed to script directionality. By tasking Iranian bilingual participants to read and write in Persian (from right to left) it was excepted that after this priming task a movement from right to left would be perceived as faster as opposed to faster time passage of a movement from left to right (as is the case in Dutch participants). No clear results were found for the reversal of the effect in Iranian participants nor was the same effect found as in Dutch participants. Thus the results provide no backing for the hypothesis that script directionality is the main influencer in faster time perception of a left to right movement. A possible limitation of the study was that some participants had too much experience in western script directionality which distorted the results. Analysis of a subsequently sent questionnaire suggested that a significant portion of the tested participants represented the past on the left and showed the same time perception effects as Dutch participants. Future research should test participants that are only fluent in Persian to assess whether the effect does reverse in Iranian monolingual participants.