title: In touch with mental rotation: interactions between mental and tactile rotations and motor responses.
abstract: Although several process models have described the cognitive processing stages that are involved in mentally rotating objects, the exact nature of the rotation process itself remains elusive. According to embodied cognition, cognitive functions are deeply grounded in the sensorimotor system. We thus hypothesized that modal rotation perceptions should influence mental rotations. We conducted two studies in which participants had to judge if a rotated letter was visually presented canonically or mirrored. Concurrently, participants had to judge if a tactile rotation on their palm changed direction during the trial. The results show that tactile rotations can systematically influence mental rotation performance in that same rotations are favored. In addition, the results show that mental rotations produce a response compatibility effect: clockwise mental rotations facilitate responses to the right, while counterclockwise mental rotations facilitate responses to the left. We conclude that the execution of mental rotations activates cognitive mechanisms that are also used to perceive rotations in different modalities and that are associated with directional motor control processes.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Modeling, Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany. johannes.lohmann@uni-tuebingen.de.
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lohmann
authors.affiliation: Evolutionary Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Bettina
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rolke
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Modeling, Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Martin V
authors.initials: MV
authors.lastname: Butz
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D010812:Physical Stimulation / Q000295:instrumentation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012399:Rotation; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014110:Touch / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Dual-task interference; Mental rotation; Multimodal interactions; Response compatibility effect; Tactile stimulation