Mental rotation tasks
From Psy3242
Overview
Mental rotation tasks involve a person's ability to see a starting 2D or 3D object and to mentally rotate the object into a different position. These tasks also gauge a person's capacity to distinguish how the next object in a sequence is related to the original, starting object. The actual process of mental rotation takes place in the right cerebral hemisphere, an area also involved with perception.*
In order to assess competency on a mental rotation task, a participant is presented with a set number of pairs of objects. The second object in the pair is either a rotated version of the original or is a mirror image (also called an enantiomorph). If the object is rotated rather than mirrored, it is usually rotated a certain number of degrees, such as multiples of 60º. Once the task has begun, the participant's ability to distinguish between mirrored pairs and non-mirrored pairs (and subsequent response time) is recorded.
When performing a mental rotation task, a person progresses through five cognitive stages. The first stage is to imagine the object and the second is to rotate the object mentally until it is at a point where the person can compare it to the original object. The person actually makes the comparison in the third stage and then decides in the fourth stage whether the objects are the same. In the final stage, the participant reports his conclusion to the investigator.
Boys tend to be better at mental rotation tasks than girls which could be from experience but, as this tends to be an early developmental characteristic, it could also be due to differential brain organization. (Stirling)
According to PET research, the parietal lobe seems to be involved in the performance of mental rotation tasks. Patients with damage in the right hemisphere tend to have more trouble and slower response times when engaging in these tasks. (Stirling) A result like this is in keeping with the idea that the right hemisphere is more involved in spatially-oriented tasks and more likely to cause this kind of difficulty when damaged.
