Journal
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 68, Issue 1, Pages 41-48Publisher
HOGREFE PUBLISHING CORP
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000505
Keywords
mental rotation; human-body analogy; embodiment; spatial perspective-taking; spatial transformation; spatial cognition
Categories
Funding
- JSPS [19J00072]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [19J00072] Funding Source: KAKEN
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The study found that mental rotation with human-like objects led to shorter response times compared to nonsense objects, and that spatial perspective-taking had a stronger negative correlation with response times for human-like objects. This suggests that human-like stimuli induce a strategy shift towards efficient egocentric mental rotation in the same/different mental rotation task.
People can mentally rotate objects that resemble human bodies more efficiently than nonsense objects in the same/different judgment task. Previous studies proposed that this human-body advantage in mental rotation is mediated by one's projections of body axes onto a human-like object, implying that human-like objects elicit a strategy shift, from an object-based to an egocentric mental rotation. To test this idea, we investigated whether mental rotation performance involving a human-like object had a stronger association with spatial perspective-taking, which entails egocentric mental rotation, than a nonsense object. In the present study, female participants completed a chronometric mental rotation task with nonsense and human-like objects. Their spatial perspective-taking ability was then assessed using the Road Map Test and the Spatial Orientation Test. Mental rotation response times (RTs) were shorter for human-like than for nonsense objects, replicating previous research. More importantly, spatial perspective-taking had a stronger negative correlation with RTs for human-like than for nonsense objects. These findings suggest that human-like stimuli in the same/different mental rotation task induce a strategy shift toward efficient egocentric mental rotation.
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