Discovery Lab: Mental Rotation Part 5 - Discovery Labs (HIDDEN)

Debriefing

Have a look at the results for this experiment. In a typical mental rotation experiment, response times increase with the degree of rotation for trials where the object is the same. When individual data is analyzed, a similar result is found for most people (though some people complete the task faster than others). Trials where the objects were different were created by taking the mirror image of the object and rotating it a set number of degrees, which is why we can have a degree of rotation measure for these trials. This result suggests that while people may vary widely in how they describe the experience of doing a task that involves mental imagery, such as the ‘walk through the school’ exercise described in the introduction, the process of image manipulation appears to be fairly consistent across different people.

Question for Review

Sheppard and Metzler (1971) were ‘pioneers’ in the study of mental rotation. Based on the results from their experiments, it was predicted that for every 30 degrees of rotation, an individual requires an additional 600 ms to make a decision in a mental rotation task. Are your results consistent with Sheppard and Metzler’s (1971) prediction? Explain your answer.