Reading direction causes spatial biases in mental model construction in language understanding Román, Antonio Flumini, Andrea Lizano, Pilar Escobar, Marysol Santiago De Torres, Julio Ramón 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. 2024-10-17T08:36:09Z 2024-10-17T08:36:09Z 2015-12-15 journal article Román, A. et. al. Sci Rep 5, 18248 (2016). [https://doi.org/10.1038/srep18248] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/96050 10.1038/srep18248 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Springer Nature