Emir Akbuga

I am a cognitive psychologist specializing in temporal cognition, with a particular focus on spatial metaphors of time and co-speech gestures. My research program investigates how the human mind uses space to conceptualize time. Specifically, my work addresses the following core questions:

How do we use spatial representations to facilitate temporal reasoning?

How does temporal thinking manifest through linguistic structures and manual gestures?

In what ways do language and gesture both represent and shape our conceptualization of time?

My research occupies the intersection of cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, while incorporating insights from cognitive neuroscience to address multifaceted temporal phenomena. My recent projects have explored the visual organization of temporal events, the gestural correlates of various meanings of "time," and the link between spatial metaphors and duration perception.