Is time an embodied property of concepts?

Abstract

A haircut usually lasts under an hour. But how long does it take to recognize that something is an instance of a haircut? And is this “time-to-perceive” a part of the representation of concepts like haircut? Across three experiments testing lexical decision, word recognition, and semantic decision, we show that the amount of time people say it takes to perceive a concept in the world (e.g., haircut, dandelion, or merit) predicts how long it takes for them to respond to a word referring to that thing, over and above the effects of other lexical-semantic variables (e.g., word frequency, concreteness) and other variables related to conceptual complexity (e.g., how confusable a concept is with other, similar concepts, or the diversity of the contexts in which a concept appears). These results suggest that our experience of how long it takes to recognize an instance of a concept can become a part of its representation, and that we simulate this information when reading words. Consequently, we suggest that time may be an embodied property of concepts.