title: Mental rotation of letters, body parts and complex scenes: separate or common mechanisms?
abstract: This study compares mental rotation with three stimuli: letters, body parts and complex scenes. Twenty-four subjects saw letters and judged whether they were mirror-reversed or not (task LETTER), saw pictures of a hand and indicated whether it was a right or a left one (task HAND), and saw drawings of a person at a table on which a weapon and a rose laid and decided whether the weapon was to the person's right or left (task SCENE). Stimuli were presented in canonical orientation or rotated by up to 180°. Our analyses focused on intra-subject correlations between reaction times of the different tasks. We found that reaction times for stimuli in canonical orientation co-varied in HAND and LETTER, the increase of reaction times with increasing object rotation co-varied in HAND and SCENE, and reaction times for 180° rotations co-varied between all tasks. We suggest that basic processes like visual perception and decision-making are distinct for scenes versus letters and body parts, that the mechanism for mental rotation of letters is distinct from that for mental self- and body part rotation, and suggest an extra mechanism for 180° rotations that shared among all tasks. These findings confirm and expand hypotheses about mental rotation that were based on comparisons of between-subject means.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physiology and Anatomy, German Sport University Cologne, Germany. Dalecki@dshs-koeln.de
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dalecki
authors.forename: Uwe
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hoffmann
authors.forename: Otmar
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Bock
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D018594:Human Body; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007699:Kinesthesis; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011340:Problem Solving; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult