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= __ Mental Rotation __ =

By Kyle Conway and Rob Leinheiser
** Mental Rotation is the process of imagining an object rotated into a different orientation in space. **

In 1971, psychologists Shepard and Metzler proposed the idea of mental rotation in the field of cognitive science. By suggesting that analog representations have an important role to play in thinking, the findings also raised difficulties for the (digital) computer model of the mind that lay at the heart of the newly emerging field of cognitive science. By presenting the subjects with pairs of drawings of three-dimensional, asymmetrical assemblages of cubes, as shown below in sections A, B, and C, the goal embedded in this was to see if the two sides were mirror images or different. In each pair, the right-hand picture either showed an assemblage identical to that shown on the left, but rotated from the original position by a certain amount, or else it showed an assemblage that was not only rotated, but was also the mirror image of the one to the left (section C).



Shepard believed that the task would be done by forming a three-dimensional mental image of one of the depicted objects, and rotating this whole image, in the imagination, to see whether it could be brought into correspondence with the other picture. The results showed that for each subject, the time taken to confirm that both objects of a pair were, in fact, identical, increased in direct proportion to the angular rotational difference between them. Some researchers challenged Shepard's contention that his results show that images are rotated as a whole, rather than their parts being compared in a piecemeal fashion.

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Sources:

Thomas, Nigel. (2010). Mental Rotation. (2010).Stanford encyclopedia for philosophy. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Shepard, Roger, & Cooper, Lynn. (n.d.). Mental Rotation. Scholarpedia. Retrieved January 17, 2011, from http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Mental_rotation