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Description: Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, e.g., the description ‘one meeting happened during another’ could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events by representing their starts and ends along a spatial axis, i.e., an iconic representation of time. To draw conclusions from this iconic mental model, reasoners consciously scan it in the direction of earlier to later time points. The account predicts an iconicity bias: people should prefer descriptions that are congruent with an iconic scanning procedure – descriptions that mention the starts of events before the ends of events – over logically equivalent but incongruent descriptions. Six experiments corroborated the prediction; they show that iconicity biases in temporal reasoning manifest in cases when reasoners consciously evaluate the durations of events.