Mental Rotation

Overview

Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum—Johns Hopkins University

Visual mental imagery refers to the ability to conjure images in one’s mind’s eye. This allows people to process visual material above and beyond the constraints of a current point-of-view; for example, a person could imagine, using their mind’s eye, how something might look in a different color, or what it would look like if it were made from a different material or rotated and seen from a different perspective. Mental imagery seems to support important human behaviors in many contexts. For example, people report visualizing routes and maps when planning a route or giving directions. They report visualizing movements, such as swinging a bat, to prepare for an actual action. They also report the mental rotation of objects in order to consider how an object might fit into a receptacle or clear a barrier.

This video demonstrates how to use the mental rotation procedure in order to investigate visual mental imagery.

Procedure

1. Stimulus design.

Present the stimuli for this experiment—letters and numbers, along with their mirror images (Figure 1)—in various rotations.

Figure 1. Sample stimuli for a mental rotation task. The top rows show two characters (R and 4) and a copy of each rotated. The bottom row shows a mirror image of each (on the right side of each pair) and a rotated version of each, as well. T

Results

A common way to graph the results is to plot the response time for each character as a function of the rotation of the character (and its mirror image; Figure 6).

Figure 6. Results from the mental rotation task. Response times are plotted for each of the characters as a function of the amount of rotation in a given trial. Generally, response times are

Application and Summary

One of the main practical applications for mental rotation tasks is to identify people who are especially good at visual thinking about physical spaces. Think about the skills it takes to be a good architect, mechanical engineer, an expert carpenter, or welder. Some people are really good at using mental imagery to guide their actions, and some people are not very good at all, reporting that they don’t even really see pictures in their mind’s eye the way most people do. The mental rotation test is a good way