Mental-Rotation Effect: A Function of Elementary Stimulus Discriminability?

Abstract

It is well known that when humans have to decide whether two differently oriented shapes are identical or mirror images their performance deteriorates as a function of the orientation disparity (mental-rotation effect). Here it is shown that the effect can also be obtained reliably with non-mirror-image, arbitrarily different polygons provided they are previously selected to be hard to discriminate. The slope of the decision speed versus orientation disparity functions was found to be inversely related to the discriminability of shapes under conditions of no, ie 0°, orientation disparity. Easily discriminable polygon pairs yielded essentially flat, no-effect functions. The arbitrary polygons that were more difficult to discriminate produced a rotation effect that was similar to those of mirror-image polygon pairs. Mirror images in this context may only be a special case of hard-to-discriminate stimuli. We also show that the speed of judging whether simple lines were of the same or different length was similarly subject to a rotation effect provided that the length differences were sufficiently small, ie when their baseline dicriminability was poor enough. It is suggested that the mental rotation of complex shapes (eg polygons) may build on rotation effects pertaining to the simpler elements of which they are composed. Further, some special effects associated with the rotation of such simpler components may explain certain peculiarities apparent in orientation invariance functions obtained with complex stimuli.