title: Dissociating the effects of angular disparity and image similarity in mental rotation and object recognition.
abstract: Performance is often impaired linearly with increasing angular disparity between two objects in tasks that measure mental rotation or object recognition. But increased angular disparity is often accompanied by changes in the similarity between views of an object, confounding the impact of the two factors in these tasks. We examined separately the effects of angular disparity and image similarity on handedness (to test mental rotation) and identity (to test object recognition) judgments with 3-D novel objects. When similarity was approximately equated, an effect of angular disparity was only found for handedness but not identity judgments. With a fixed angular disparity, performance was better for similar than dissimilar image pairs in both tasks, with a larger effect for identity than handedness judgments. Our results suggest that mental rotation involves mental transformation procedures that depend on angular disparity, but that object recognition is predominately dependent on the similarity of image features.
authors: Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, PMB 407817, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-7817, USA. olivia.cheung@vanderbilt.edu
authors: Olivia S
authors: OS
authors: Cheung
authors: William G
authors: WG
authors: Hayward
authors: Isabel
authors: I
authors: Gauthier
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult