Is forward associated with right and backwards with left? The following is an observation I made in an informal sample group of about 10 people. I am looking into understanding the behavior I observed. Here is the setting:

On a computer keyboard there are the 4 arrow directions: up/forward, down/backward, left and right. Only the up/forward and down/backward keys are functional. On the screen is a first-person view that can rotate left (counterclockwise) and right (clockwise). The up/forward and down/backward keys are to be bounded to those rotations, so that pressing one would rotate the view in the bound direction.

I've noticed that most people bind the up/forward key to the right rotation and the down/backward key to the left rotation. I thought that this has to do with handedness, but it seems not to be the case. The exact numbers don't matter because there is not enough here for statistical significance. It could be that there is an association of clockwise rotation with (time) moving forwards, and same for counterclockwise.

Is there any reasoning for this, or studies on this?
It may have to do with language.

The idea that language influences thought is called Linguistic Relativity:


  The more accepted weak version claims that linguistic categories and
  usage only influence thoughts and decisions.


Lera Boroditsky summarizes research on the influence language has on direction and time:


  English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial
  metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"),
  whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the
  next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month").
  ... Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a
  spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot,
  here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put
  tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly
  always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point
  vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English
  speakers.


And in more detail in a Scientific American article:


  ... my colleague Alice Gaby of the University of California, Berkeley,
  and I gave Kuuk Thaayorre speakers sets of pictures that showed
  temporal progressions—a man aging, a crocodile growing, a banana being
  eaten. We then asked them to arrange the shuffled photographs on the
  ground to indicate the correct temporal order. We tested each person
  twice, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. English
  speakers given this task will arrange the cards so that time proceeds
  from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards
  from right to left. This shows that writing direction in a language
  influences how we organize time. The Kuuk Thaayorre, however, did not
  routinely arrange the cards from left to right or right to left. They
  arranged them from east to west. ... in Aymara, a language spoken in
  the Andes, the past is said to be in front and the future behind. And
  the Aymara speakers’ body language matches their way of talking: in
  2006 Raphael Núñez of U.C.S.D. and Eve Sweetser of U.C. Berkeley found
  that Aymara gesture in front of them when talking about the past and
  behind them when discussing the future.


This suggests that if you reversed the exercise, binding the left/right keys to movement forward or back, then you might get different results from Hebrew speakers than English ones.  And if you presented this exercise to speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, then the results might depend on which way the keyboard is oriented - ie, you would get different results depending on whether the keyboard faces East or West!