Competing with conceptual metaphor theory, several appealing theoretical alternatives have been suggested. For example, the cognitive archeology proposal suggests that while mappings are important for the emergence of novel word senses, once those senses become established their on-line comprehension is exclusively a matter of the target domain concepts (Gentner & Bowdle, 2001). The structural similarity proposal (Murphy, 1996) suggests that the two domains of a metaphor share inherent similarities, but neither domain can be considered more "basic" than the other, and the source domain is not invoked in metaphor comprehension. Conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) and the space-structuring model (Coulson & Matlock, 2001) propose a more flexible organization of mappings that don't necessarily follow the direction source-to-target. Studies to date have all involved off-line measures, and have often been based on participants' interpretation of a single expression about time. The present study addressed the relationship between time and space with a novel paradigm, providing online measures for the question whether motion metaphors for time affect the perception of spatial motion. A particular goal was to shed light on the question whether the abstract domain (time) can also have an influence on the concrete domain (space), since this is a major question in which the claims of conceptual metaphor theory differ not only from the claims of the cognitive archeology and the structural similarity proposal, but also from those of conceptual blending theory or the space-structuring model. (Ursina Teuscher, Jennifer Collins and Seana Coulson)