Search results for "MENTAL ROTATION"
showing 10 items of 22 documents
Aging Affects the Mental Rotation of Left and Right Hands
2009
BACKGROUND:Normal aging significantly influences motor and cognitive performance. Little is known about age-related changes in action simulation. Here, we investigated the influence of aging on implicit motor imagery. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:Twenty young (mean age: 23.9+/-2.8 years) and nineteen elderly (mean age: 78.3+/-4.5 years) subjects, all right-handed, were required to determine the laterality of hands presented in various positions. To do so, they mentally rotated their hands to match them with the hand-stimuli. We showed that: (1) elderly subjects were affected in their ability to implicitly simulate movements of the upper limbs, especially those requiring the largest amplit…
For the mind's eye the world is two-dimensional.
2010
The nature of visual mental images is a topic that has puzzled neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers alike. On the one hand, mental images might preserve the 3-D properties of our perceptual world. On the other hand, they might be akin to 2-D pictures, such as photographs, paintings, or drawings. In the present study, 16 observers judged where real objects (Experiment 1) or photographs thereof (Experiment 2) were pointing. Both experiments contained a perception condition and an imagery condition. In Experiment 1, there was a significant difference between the pointing errors in the perception and the imagery conditions, whereas there was no such difference in Experiment 2. In im…
Cerebellar Contribution to Mental Rotation: a cTBS Study
2013
A cerebellar role in spatial information processing has been advanced even in the absence of physical manipulation, as occurring in mental rotation. The present study was aimed at investigating the specific involvement of left and right cerebellar hemispheres in two tasks of mental rotation. We used continuous theta burst stimulation to downregulate cerebellar hemisphere excitability in healthy adult subjects performing two mental rotation tasks: an Embodied Mental Rotation (EMR) task, entailing an egocentric strategy, and an Abstract Mental Rotation (AMR) task entailing an allocentric strategy. Following downregulation of left cerebellar hemisphere, reaction times were slower in comparison…
Enhanced Spatial Navigation Skills in Sequence-Space Synesthetes
2018
Contains fulltext : 219554.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Individuals with sequence-space synesthesia (SSS) perceive sequences like months, days and numbers in certain spatial arrangements. Several cognitive benefits have been associated with SSS, such as enhanced mental rotation, more vivid visual imagery and an advantage in spatial processing. The current study aimed to further investigate these cognitive benefits, focusing on spatial navigation skills, to explore if their enhanced sensitivity to spatial relations is reflected in enhanced navigational performance. Synesthetes were distinguished from controls by means of a questionnaire, a consistency test and drawings. A virtu…
Right-handers and left-handers have different representations of their own hand
1998
The visual control of our own hand when dealing with an object and the observation of interactions between other people's hand and objects can be involved in the construction of internal representations of our own hand, as well as in hand recognition processes. Therefore, a different effect on handedness recognition is expected when subjects are presented with hands holding objects with either a congruent or an incongruent type of grip. Such an experiment was carried out on right-handed and left-handed subjects. We expected that the different degree of lateralisation in motor activities observed in the two populations [J. Herron, Neuropsychology of left- handedness, Academic Press, New York…
Alternative Strategies in Processing 3D Objects Diagrams: Static, Animated and Interactive Presentation of a Mental Rotation Test in an Eye Movements…
2014
Spatial abilities involved in reasoning with diagrams have been assessed using tests supposed to require mental rotation (cube figures of the Vandenberg & Kruse). However, Hegarty (2010) described alternative strategies: Mental rotation is not always used; analytical strategies can be used instead. In this study, we compared three groups of participants in three external formats of presentation of the referent figure in the Vandenberg & Kruse test: static, animated, interactive. During the test, participants were eye tracked. After the test, they were interrogated on their strategies for each item during the viewing of the replay of their own eye movement in a cued retrospective verbal prot…
Cognitive performance and emotion are indifferent to ambient color
2017
Folklore has it that ambient color has the power to relax or arouse the observer and enhance performance when executing cognitive tasks. We picked a number of commercially available colors that allegedly have the power to alter cognitive performance and the emotional state, and exposed subjects to them while solving a battery of cognitive tasks. The colors were “Cool Down Pink”, which is said to produce relaxing effects and reduce effort, “Energy Red”, allegedly enhancing performance via increased arousal, “Relaxing Blue”, which is said to enhance attention and concentration, as well as white as a control. In a between-subjects design, a total of 170 high school students carried out five ta…
Head and Body Coordination during Locomotion and Complex Movements
1994
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses theory in which it is argued that during complex movements, the head is stabilized intermittently under the control of gaze, and that this stabilization allows the head to serve as an inertial guidance platform for the control of multilimb movement. The otolithic organs, sacculus and utriculus, are inertial detectors of linear acceleration of the head in the plane of their macula. It is well established that in normal gravity conditions, although the perceived gravitational vertical deviates from the objective vertical by a few degrees, gravitational reference is used not only for posture but also for perceptual tasks that involve orientation in spac…
Recognising a hand by grasp.
2000
The present study aimed to demonstrate that motor representations are used to recognise biological stimuli. In three experiments subjects were required to judge laterality of hands and forearms presented by pictures. The postures of the hands were those assumed when holding a small, medium and large sphere. In experiment 1, the sphere held in hand was presented, whereas in experiment 2 it was absent. In experiment 3, the same images, showing holding-a-sphere hands, as in experiment 1 were presented, but without forearm. In all experiments one finger of each hand could be absent. In experiment 1 recognition time was longer for those hand postures for which the corresponding grasping motor ac…
Effect of Handedness on Mental Rotation
2018
The impact of the dominant hand on the response time and precision in mental rotational tasks seems to be controversial. The goal of this study was to compare the differences in response times of mental rotation tasks when the task is performed with the dominant or non-dominant hand. In this study, 44 right-handers and 45 left-handers participated in mental rotation tests with 2-D and 3-D figures. Findings indicate that the right-handers had shorter response times than left-handers in tests with both types of figures.