Abstract Does the spatial-temporal association of response codes ( STEARC ) effect affected by subjective temporal characteristics? In this study, we investigate whether temporal focus is one of the influencing factors of STEARC effect. Results of spatial-temporal metaphor refer that there’s a left-to-right mental time line in our mind. However, studies have found that the pattern and the direction of this effect could be influenced by cultural features (mainly read and writing direction) or experimental conditions (by priming tasks). In another word, the STEARC effects are not the same as each other in the performance of people with different reading/writing directions or in different experimental priming conditions. Recently, researches proposed and supported a temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or temporal personality divided by old and young) is future oriented or past oriented. Hence, we made an attempt to investigate whether participants with different temporal focus, but in common culture and age group, could also show a different response in the left-right horizontal axis of STEARC effect. Or other, this research assumed that STEARC effect could be affected by individuals’ different temporal focus. The Temporal Focus Scale (TFS) was used to divide the participants into two groups, temporal focus towards the past and focus towards the future. And after this step, a total of 49 undergraduates and graduate students (25 focus towards the past, 24 focus towards the future ) were qualified to participate the modified response-discrimination paradigm experiment. In this experiment, participants were asked to response, by pressing the key ( “P” or ”Q” ) on the computer keyboard, to both different locus of a point and different meanings of temporal words. A total of 42 temporal words of Chinese were used, half of them referring to past time and the other half referring to future time. The experiment was conducted with a 2 (point location: left/right) × 2 (temporal reference: past/future) × 2 ( temporal focus: past/future ) between-subject design, to examine whether people with different temporal focus would show a different pattern of temporal-spatial representation. The assume was that responses were faster when the test requirements were consistent with individuals’ temporal focus, whereas it may took a respectively longer response time if the experimental conditions were disaccord to their temporal focus. The results show that the diversity on the STEARC effect was observed by distinguishing participants into different temporal focus. Persons with temporal focus towards the past judged faster to “ left / past” , and persons with temporal focus towards the future responded faster to “ right / future ”. Different levels of attention allocation may be the reason that temporal focus could influent our temporal-spatial metaphor. And this co-processing pattern between STEARC effect and temporal focus conforms to the Coherent Working Models. In conclusion, these findings provide evidence that the temporal-focus hypothesis between time and space observed in fore-behind axis also exists in left-right axis of STEARC effect. Based on relevant literatures, there are many other factors affecting the temporal-spatial metaphor. Thus, in the future, both objective and subjective conditions of experiments on temporal representation should be better controlled.