Does time extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? A multitask crosscultural study Callizo-Romero, Carmen Tutnjević, Slavica Pandza, Maja Ouellet, Marc Kranjec, Alexander Ilić, Sladjana Göksun, Tilbe Chahboun, Sobh Casasanto, Daniel Santiago De Torres, Julio Ramón cross-cultural studies self-continuity temporal asymmetry temporal depth temporal distance time discounting temporal focus All materials, data, and statistical analyses of the study reported in this article can be accessed at https://osf.io/bwt5r/. Does temporal thought extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? Do asymmetries depend on cultural differences in temporal focus? Some studies suggest that people in Western (arguably future-focused) cultures perceive the future as being closer, more valued, and deeper than the past (a future asymmetry), while the opposite is shown in East Asian (arguably past-focused) cultures. The proposed explanations of these findings predict a negative relationship between past and future: the more we delve into the future, the less we delve into the past. Here, we report findings that pose a significant challenge to this view. We presented several tasks previously used to measure temporal asymmetry (self-continuity, time discounting, temporal distance, and temporal depth) and two measures of temporal focus to American, Spanish, Serbian, Bosniak, Croatian, Moroccan, Turkish, and Chinese participants (total N = 1,075). There was an overall future asymmetry in all tasks except for temporal distance, but the asymmetry only varied with cultural temporal focus in time discounting. Past and future held a positive (instead of negative) relation in the mind: the more we delve into the future, the more we delve into the past. Finally, the findings suggest that temporal thought has a complex underlying structure. 2025-01-17T09:08:03Z 2025-01-17T09:08:03Z 2022-03-31 journal article https://hdl.handle.net/10481/99488 10.1017/langcog.2022.5 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Language and Cognition