A comparison between mental object and viewer rotation reveals a substantial difficulty for viewer rotations greater than 90
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: In mental object rotation tasks participants imagine an object rotating, whereas in mental viewer rotation tasks the participants imagine themselves moving around an object or scene. Given that the relative motion of the participant and object is the same, do imagined object rotations involve different cognitive processes than imagined viewer rotations? In three experiments, participants performed imagined object and viewer rotations on pictures of bilaterally asymmetric objects (e.g., a hammer) presented at oblique orientations. In the first experiment, participants drew the stimulus after imagined object rotations of 0°, 90°CW, 90°CCW or 180°. In the second experiment participants drew the stimulus after imagined viewer rotations of 0°, 90°CW, 90°CCW or 180°. Analyses of errors revealed that 180° viewer rotations were substantially more difficult than all other object or viewer rotations. A third experiment revealed that the difficulty extended to 135° viewer rotations. Interestingly, the difficulty for 135° and 180° viewer rotations was observed only when the correct response orientation was oblique, and not for cardinal response orientations. We interpret these findings within a theoretical framework that characterizes both object and viewer rotations as transformations over mental representations that specify the correspondence between two reference frames. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013
Source: Journal of Vision
DOI: 10.1167/13.9.678
Institution: Johns Hopkins University
Language: English
Subfield: Automotive Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,850
OpenAlex ID: W1975059617