Why do we look toward the “front” when we think about the future, but think toward the “back” when we think about the past?

Whenever we bring up the future, we always connect it with the “front.” We call an attitude oriented toward the future “looking ahead,” and we say things like “the future is right before our eyes” or “the future is coming straight at us”—the future is “in front” of us.

The past, by contrast, is always associated with what’s “behind us.” Being absorbed in the past is called “looking back,” policy reversals are described as “putting history into reverse,” and forgetting the past means “casting it behind one’s head.”

This connection feels so natural (and it appears across cultures, East and West alike) that if you broke it—for example, by saying “the future is quietly creeping up from behind”—it would sound extremely strange, right?

But have you ever wondered how the passage of time became linked to the front-back direction of visual space?

The reasonable inference goes like this:

First, time—as time never stops flowing, events that have already happened tend to move farther away from us, while events that are going to happen tend to draw closer and closer.

Now, the visual front-back direction—as people spend the vast majority of their time moving forward, things behind the body tend to move farther away from us, while things in front tend to draw closer and closer.

So the brain linked these similar tendencies together:

In front of the body = future;
Behind the body = past.

How can we test this inference? Some scientists recently had an idea: for people who were blind from birth or lost their sight very early in life, the connection between “front and back” and “past/future in time” should be much weaker, because they have never experienced objects visually moving toward or away from them.

The study was just published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General:

Rinaldi, L., Vecchi, T., Fantino, M., Merabet, L. B., & Cattaneo, Z. (2018). The ego-moving metaphor of time relies on visual experience: No representation of time along the sagittal space in the blind. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(3), 444-450.

The researchers recruited a group of sighted participants and a group of people who were blind from birth or early childhood, and asked them to complete this task. The task had two conditions—

Coordinated condition:

If participants heard a word or phrase referring to the past (for example, “just now” or “he has written…”), they had to move their bodies backward to press a key;
if they heard a word or phrase referring to the future (for example, “about to arrive” or “he will write…”), they had to move their bodies forward to press a key.

Incoordinated condition:

The associations above were reversed—when they saw a past-related word, they moved their bodies forward; when they saw a future-related word, they moved backward.

The results showed that sighted participants responded faster in the “coordinated condition” than in the “incoordinated condition,” suggesting that the association between “in front–future/behind–past” was very strong in their minds.

For the blind participants, however, there was no difference in response speed between the two conditions. This suggests that the association was very weak or even absent in their minds.

This suggests that the link between time and front-back position depends heavily on repeatedly having visual experiences.

Interestingly, blind people have another time-space association: they link the “left” with the “past,” and the “right” with the “future.” For blind people, one of the more common spatial experiences is reading Braille (most Braille, like ordinary written text, is read from left to right). The left side contains information they have already finished reading and that has moved away from them, while the right side contains information they are about to read and that is moving toward them. So: left = past, right = future.

p.s.:

This article drew on a report from Research Digest:

Why do we think of the future as being in front? New clues from study of people born blind

Author: Alex Fradera

Note

• This “New Findings in Psychology” series consisted of short popular-psychology articles and informal essays written at the time to accompany the related content of Zhichao Wei: New Findings in Psychology. They were published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.