Mental Rotation: How Does the Angular Orientation of an Object Affect a Participant’s Reaction Time?

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Mental Rotation: How does the angular orientation of an object affect a participant’s reaction time? Abstract We evaluated the effect of replacing abstract shapes with familiar objects on a mental rotation task modelled on Shepard and Metzler’s 1971 experiment. There were 152 non-naive participants drawn from the University of Hull psychology undergraduates, split into 76 pairs. 76 participants completed 101 mental rotation tasks in one hour, telling their partner whether the pair of images they were presented with were the same or different. Their partner timed the response time and input the data into a spreadsheet. It was found that like the Shepard and Metzler study, participants took proportionally longer to respond with more extreme angles of rotation. However results also showed they were overall much faster to respond to familiar objects than they were in the original study. These results can lead to new interpretations of the mental rotation process. Mental Rotation: How does the angular orientation of an object affect a participant’s reaction time? Shepard and Metzler‘s 1971 study demonstrated to Cognitive Science that mental images could be studied in an objective and quantitive way. They had internally noted the mental rotation phenomenon, to test it quantitively they developed a hypothesis. If a person mentally rotates objects in their mind, an increase in the angle of rotation would cause an increase in time needed to rotate it. They tested this by having participants’ match, as fast as they could pairs of geometric shapes that was either identical or mirror images, which were presented at different angles of rotation. Their findings, that reaction time increased linearly with angle of rotation, backed their hypothesis. The findings of this and similar studies around this time directly contradicted the then

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