Mental Rotation and the Automatic Updating of Body-Centered Spatial Relationships

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 227 - 233
• Main Authors: Farrell, Martin J, Robertson, Ian H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Psychological Association 01-01-1998
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Cognition. Intelligence; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Male; Memory; Mental Rotation; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Reasoning. Problem solving; Rotational Behavior; Spatial Orientation (Perception); Human; Mental imagery; Mental rotation; Visual imagery; Cognition; Space perception; Experimental study; Body; Rotation
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.24.1.227

Blindfolded adult participants (7 male and 9 female) were
asked to point to previously seen targets after a body rotation. In
1 condition, participants had to update their positions relative to
the targets during rotation; in another condition, they had to
ignore the rotation and to imagine that they were still in their
initial orientation. In the updating condition, replicating research
of
J. J. Rieser (1989)
, response latencies were only slightly affected by the magnitude of
the body rotation. In the ignoring condition, however, response
latencies increased with the angular difference between the
participants' new position and their original orientation, suggesting that the participants updated their positions and then
retrospectively "undid" this updating to mentally reestablish
their original orientation. The results are supportive of the idea
that heading is updated automatically as a person moves so that she
or he is always primarily oriented with respect to her or his actual
position.