The advantage of mentally rotating clockwise.
The time taken to decide whether a character is shown in its mirror or normal version has been shown to increase approximately linearly with the angular departure from an up-right position. Additionally, in some studies, decisions took longer for clockwise tilted characters than for counterclockwise tilted ones. Other studies do not report the latter effect. We argue that inconsistencies across studies are caused by variance in participants' strategies. The task employed here was specifically designed to bring these strategies and thereby the direction of rotation under experimental control. From the EEG recorded during the rotation period, we extracted an event-related slow potential whose amplitude is sensitive to the amount of mental rotation. In both strategy conditions, the slow potential's amplitude was lower for clockwise than for counterclockwise rotations. We take this as evidence that mental rotation of alphanumeric characters is easier in a clockwise than in a counterclockwise direction.
International Research Training Group Adaptive Minds, Brain & Cognition Unit, Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. hr.liesefeld@mx.uni-saarland.de
Heinrich R
HR
Liesefeld
Hubert D
HD
Zimmer
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D012399:Rotation; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*