Abstract

How are we able to think about things we've never seen or touched? We demonstrate that abstract knowledge is built analogically from more experiencebased knowledge. People’s understanding of the abstract domain of time, for example, is so intimately dependent on the more experience-based domain of space, that when people make a an air journey or bet on a racehorse, they also unwittingly (and dramatically) change their thinking about time. Further, it appears that abstract thinking is built on representations of more experience-based domains that are functionally separable from those involved directly in sensorimotor experience itself.