title: Mental rotation: a computationally plausible account of transformation through intermediate steps.
abstract: A critical difficulty in theories of the 'mental rotation' phenomenon has been to find a computationally plausible reason why the rotation should occur in small intermediate steps. It is pointed out that this difficulty is peculiar to metrical representations: if spatial relations are presented symbolically but nonmetrically, then the iterative or recursive application of minimal transformations is memory saving. A program ROTTER is described to illustrate this principle.
mesh_terms: D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D009949:Orientation; D012984:Software; D013028:Space Perception