Reading direction causes spatial biases in mental model construction in language understanding

Correlational evidence suggests that the experience of reading and writing in a certain direction is able to induce spatial biases at both low-level perceptuo-motor skills and high-level conceptual representations. However, in order to support a causal relationship, experimental evidence is required. In this study, we asked whether the direction of the script is a sufficiente cause of spatial biases in the mental models that understanders build when listening to language. In order to establish causality, we manipulated the experience of reading a script with different directionalities. Spanish monolinguals read either normal (left-to-right), mirror reversed (right-to-left), rotated downward (up-down), or rotated upward (down-up) texts, and then drew the contents of auditory descriptions such as “the square is between the cross and the triangle”. The directionality of the drawings showed that a brief reading experience is enough to cause congruent and very specific spatial biases in mental model construction. However, there were also clear limits to this flexibility: there was a strong overall preference to arrange the models along the horizontal dimension. Spatial preferences when building mental models from language are the results of both short-term and long-term biases.