Abstract

Humans show a systematic tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past. Here, the chapter reviews recent evidence on visually deprived individuals, as well as on clinical (i.e. with depressive and anxiety traits) and non-clinical populations. The chapter suggests that such a temporal asymmetry is a consequence of experiential movement through both space and time, especially during walking behavior. Our everyday life bodily experience, indeed, is clearly asymmetrical along the sagittal axis: in typical forward locomotion, future events are associated with diminishing spatial distance, whereas past events are associated with increasing distance from the body. The chapter, therefore, discusses how a sensorimotor framework can exhaustively account for the general propensity to conceive the future as closer to the present as compared to the past.