Rapidata/mental-timeline-atlas

🧭 The Mental Timeline Atlas (84k Taps Across the World)

Where in space do people place the past and the future? 84,000 respondents worldwide saw a blank canvas with a single dot marked "today" and were asked to tap where tomorrow, yesterday, 10 years from now, and five other moments in time belong. One tap per person. This dataset contains every tap, with respondent-level language, country, and demographic metadata.

Companion datasets: kiki–bouba text and kiki–bouba audio. Collected with the Rapidata API in August 2026. Please consider leaving a heart if this dataset is useful to you.

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Abstract

Psycholinguistics has long held that literate humans carry a mental timeline — a spatial mapping of time whose direction follows the writing system they read (Boroditsky 2001; Casasanto & Boroditsky 2008). Almost all evidence comes from small laboratory samples. We elicited single-tap spatial placements of eight temporal expressions from a worldwide respondent pool, ~10,000 responses per question, plus a "tap anywhere" control condition. Three results stand out. (1) The timeline is real, horizontal, and metric: taps for past expressions cluster left of "today", future expressions right, and median tap distance grows monotonically — approximately logarithmically — with temporal distance in both directions. (2) Timeline direction tracks the writing system: speakers of left-to-right languages show strong future-right mappings (UK English viewers: +57.4 points), while Arabic viewers — bidirectional readers of a right-to-left script — show no horizontal timeline at all (+2.5 ± 4.4, n=1,799); an axis cancellation, not the reversal a naive script account predicts. (3) The far future drifts upward: the share of taps above center climbs monotonically from past to future (42% → 65% in the familiarized audience), suggesting the mental time axis is a diagonal, not a flat line.

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1. Method

Task. A locate task: respondents see a neutral 1024×1024 canvas with a black dot at the exact center and an instruction such as "The dot is today. Tap where tomorrow is." The interface accepts exactly one tap. No other marks, labels, or hints appear on the canvas.

Questions. Eight conditions, ~10,000 responses each (global audience):

key	instruction	temporal offset
ten-years-ago	The dot is today. Tap where 10 years ago is.	−10 y
childhood	The dot is today. Tap where your childhood is.	autobiographical past
yesterday	The dot is today. Tap where yesterday is.	−1 d
control	Tap anywhere on the image.	—
tomorrow	The dot is today. Tap where tomorrow is.	+1 d
day-after-tomorrow	The dot is today. Tap where the day after tomorrow is.	+2 d
next-year	The dot is today. Tap where next year is.	+1 y
ten-years-from-now	The dot is today. Tap where 10 years from now is.	+10 y

Control condition. The "tap anywhere" question measures where people tap in the absence of any temporal content. This matters: free taps skew strongly rightward (73.8% right of center), presumably reflecting handedness and thumb ergonomics on phones. All directional results below are read against this baseline, and analysts using this dataset should do the same.

Audiences. Every question ran on two respondent pools:

• global (~10,000/question) — Rapidata's worldwide audience, translated automatically into each respondent's language. The Arabic translation was additionally verified by two native Arabic speakers.
• familiarized (~500/question) — respondents who were first made familiar with the interface by solving a short series of example tasks asking them to tap in various parts of the image ("tap to the left of the dot", "tap as far right of the dot as possible", …) before contributing. Two properties of this pool are worth keeping in mind when comparing the two audiences: its respondents had already practiced the exact tap interaction on the exact canvas, and — being a smaller pool answering eight related questions — they overlap far more across questions, so many of them saw several temporal questions and therefore had more context about the task family than a typical global respondent, who often saw only one. Both factors give their taps sharper spatial structure (see §3.4).

Respondent metadata. Each tap carries country, viewing language, age bracket, gender, occupation (where available), and userScore — Rapidata's per-respondent reliability estimate, derived from performance on known-answer tasks across the platform. It is included so analysts can weight responses, exactly as the platform itself does when aggregating.

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2. Results

2.1 The timeline is real and horizontal

Past questions form a dense horizontal band left of "today"; future questions mirror it on the right. Taps concentrate on the horizontal midline far above chance. Relative to the control baseline, yesterday pulls -23.4 points leftward and next year pushes +5.1 points rightward (global audience).

2.2 Distance in time becomes distance in space

Median tap distance from "today" grows monotonically with temporal distance, in both directions, on an approximately logarithmic scale — in the familiarized audience from 21.9 (yesterday) to 44.8 (10 years from now, in canvas-percent units). Notably, childhood (43.9) lands at the same distance as 10 years ago (43.4): autobiographical time appears to share the metric of calendar time.

2.3 Direction follows the writing system — and Arabic cancels the axis

Timeline strength (tomorrow %right − yesterday %right) by viewing language: Japanese +44.2, Spanish +38.8, English (all viewers) +24.6 — and Arabic +2.5 ± 4.4: statistically indistinguishable from zero, with n=1,799. The null persists at the 10-year horizon, within every Arabic-speaking country separately (Egypt, Iraq, Algeria), in every age bracket, and among the highest-userScore respondents — so it is not explained by sample composition. Arabic speakers scale distance normally; they simply assign no consistent left–right direction. Since most Arabic readers also routinely read left-to-right material (numbers, Latin-script content), the natural interpretation is that exposure to both directions cancels the horizontal axis rather than reversing it.

The right panel decomposes English — a viewing language spanning many native scripts — by country: UK +57.4 (the strongest group in the study) down to Pakistan +10.5, where the dominant native script (Urdu) runs right-to-left. The gradient follows the script of the respondent's likely native language, reinforcing the writing-system account and illustrating why viewing language is only a proxy for native language.

2.4 The future rises

The share of taps landing above center climbs monotonically from the deep past to the far future. The effect survives a geometry check (gains in the upper-right octant are about twice those in the lower-right, so it is not an artifact of corners simply affording larger distances). The mental time axis, at least for far time, appears to tilt diagonally upward.

2.5 Interface familiarization sharpens every effect

The familiarized audience — practiced on the interaction and with more cross-question context (§1) — shows the same qualitative structure as the global audience with substantially sharper spatial statistics: fewer taps landing on the reference dot itself, a timeline strength of +59.9 (vs +27.8 global), and more taps on the horizontal axis. Consistent with this, timeline strength in the global audience increases monotonically across userScore quartiles — the platform's reliability weighting is well-calibrated for this task, and analysts should regard score-weighted (or familiarized-audience) estimates as the best estimate of the population effect.

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3. Limitations

• Viewing language is a proxy for native language and writing habits (see §2.3's English decomposition for how much this can matter).
• The canvas is finite. For the ±10-year questions a large share of taps saturate near the canvas edge, so far-lag distances are compressed; the childhood ≈ 10-years-ago equality should be read with this in mind.
• The rightward free-tap baseline (73.8% right) must be subtracted for any directional claim; raw percentages overstate future-right and understate past-left effects.
• Between-subject purity is partial: a respondent may answer more than one question (by design more often so in the familiarized audience).
• One tap records direction and magnitude but not confidence or reaction time.

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4. Dataset structure

One row per question × audience (16 rows):

• question_key / question: condition id and the instruction shown
• temporal_offset_days: signed offset (−3650 … +3650); null for control and for the autobiographical childhood question
• audience: global or familiarized
• canvas: the exact image shown (dot center at 50%, 50%)
• responses_count, and detailed_results: one entry per respondent — x, y (0–100, percent of canvas, y grows downward; the dot is at 50/50), country, language, age, gender, occupation, userScore

from datasets import load_dataset
import pandas as pd

ds = load_dataset("Rapidata/mental-timeline-atlas")
df = pd.DataFrame(ds["train"])

row = df[(df.question_key == "tomorrow") & (df.audience == "global")].iloc[0]
taps = pd.DataFrame(row["detailed_results"])
taps["dx"] = taps.x - 50   # >0 = right of "today"
print(taps.groupby("language").dx.apply(lambda s: (s > 0).mean()))

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5. Citation

If you use this dataset, please link back to this page — and consider leaving a like!