title: Cross-modal facilitation of mental rotation: effects of modality and complexity.
abstract: Performance in a visual mental rotation (MR) task has been reported to predict the ability to recognize retrograde-transformed melodies. The current study investigated the effects of melodic structure on the MR of sequentially presented visual patterns. Each trial consisted of a five-segment sequentially presented visual pattern (standard) followed by a five-tone melody that was either identical in structure to the standard or its retrograde. A visual target pattern was either the rotated version of the standard or unrelated to it. The task was to indicate whether the target pattern was a rotated version of the standard or not. Periodic patterns were not rotated but melodies facilitated the rotation of non-periodic patterns. For these, rotation latency was determined by a quantitative index of complexity (number of runs). This study provides the first experimental confirmation for cross-modal facilitation of MR.
authors.affiliation: University of Roehampton, London, UK. a.aksentijevic@roehampton.ac.uk
authors.forename: Aleksandar
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aksentijevic
authors.forename: Laura M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Garcia
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time; D012399:Rotation; D013016:Sound; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult