Manual Rotation Of Mental Rotation

Mental rotation is the capabilities of space conversion to imagine yourself or object rotation, which is an important measure of individual space intelligence, and is currently an important topic of the field of spatial cognition of concern. Mental Rotation not only has important theoretical significance on the understanding of human spatial cognition, but also has important application value. A representative study of mental rotation was conducted by Shepard and his colleagues who used three-dimensional graphics cubes. Application of the method of this research and results of the study was the appearance of an enormous impact, and is called the classical research in the field of spatial cognition. Research indicates that mental rotation is a process which is similar with objective substance rotation.Conversion of the object is in real space, and mental rotation is the visual representation in the cognitive system conversion, Shepard and his colleagues called it "two isomorphism". This study suggests that different stimulus types of the same mental rotation of the internal mechanism is different, and different types of mental rotation is also sharing limited neural resources. As a starting point, this study used the method of manual rotation to systematically examine manual rotation of different objects (cubes and hand). And it has important theoretical and practical value to understand the characteristics of mental rotation and improve individual space intelligence.In this study, a series of behavioral experiments were made to examine whether manual rotation would systematically affect the mental rotation of different objects. While mentally rotating the stimuli (hand and cubes), participants also had to manually rotate a custom-made manual rotation device (with the mental rotation in the same direction, inconsistent or non-manual rotation). This study was designed four experiments. The first experiment was a repeated measures factorial design to study whether different ways of manually rotating impacted mental rotation of the different objects. The second to the fourth experiment systematically studied whether mental rotation directions, mental rotation speed and different hands of manual rotation affected the relationship the between mental rotation and manual rotation. The second experiment following a mixed design studied whether mental rotation in different directions produced a particular effect. Experiment 3 explored whether different manual rotation speed of manual rotation affected the mental rotation, which was a repeated measures factorial design. The fourth experiment investigated whether different hands affected the results, and was a repeated measures factorial design.The results of data analysis supported the following conclusions:1. The angular distance effect of mental rotation existed in the cube pictures and the hand pictures. The RTs increased, while mental rotation angle increased.2. Manual rotation would affect the mental rotation, and the effect according to the type of stimulus (cubes or hand):For the cube figures, the no hand movement and the discordant manual rotation direction was statistically significant. For the hand figures, the discordant manual rotation direction differed significantly, as compared with no hand movement and concordant manual rotation direction. In the context of this stimulus-type specificity, the mental rotation of hand stimuli showed a clear direction-specific vulnerability to the interfering effect of the manual rotation in comparison with cube stimuli.3. Different mental rotation directions did not affect the relationship between manual rotation and mental rotation.4. Different manual rotation speed did not affect the relationship between manual rotation and mental rotation.5. Different hands of manual rotation affected the relationship between manual rotation and mental rotation. As the interaction among manual rotation, stimulus type, and hand revealed, manually rotating with the right hand affected the mental rotation of hand stimuli more strongly.