Mental Remogination And The Theory Of Mental Orientation In The Brain

After seeing the same images basically every day, such as the letters of the alphabet, the brain will automatically recognize those objects time and time again, and processing and understanding those images can be near instantaneous. However, should these images be altered in orientation, the brain must go through additional processing in order to differentiate that it is, in fact, the same object, but the time it takes to figure that out is much more than an instant. The idea of mental rotation speaks to the cerebral ability to imagine in one’s mind a particular object, oriented in a way that is unusual or not commonly seen. The brain can move (or imagine moving) objects spatially to surmise their proper orientation. A stimulus can be any image present in the environment that is altered in some way; mental rotation then occurs in order to to figure out what the altered object is. The first test of these correlations was administered in 1971 by Shepard and Metzler, and have informed the many studies related to this phenomenon since then.
Studies using blind or blindfolded subjects have tested and proved the theory of mental rotation (Carpenter & Eisenberg, 1978). Carpenter and Eisenberg’s study, as well as many others which have studied mental rotation with a variety of variables (such as gender, dominant hand and intelligence), all essentially measure the effect of mental rotation through the time it takes for an individual to correctly identify whether or not an object is different, or if it’s simply the orientation that has changed (Silvia et. al., 2013). The way in which this is typically tested is by asking a subject to compare two objects (which can be 3-dimensional objects, 2-dimensional objects, or simply letters from the ...

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...orrect with the individual subject’s gender or dominant brain hemisphere, but it does measure the effect of both the angle and the object type. There will likely be effects of both the angle and object type on reaction time, due to not only a dissimilarity between the objects and what the subjects are used to seeing, but also because of the unfamiliar nature of the random 2-dimensional figures.
We hypothesized that the more an image is rotated, the longer the reaction time will be because of the additional mental processes that must take place in order to correctly complete the object recognition. We further hypothesized that the angle will overall have a greater impact on the 2-dimensional pictures than the letters. Additionally, we hypothesized that the combination of both the object type and the angle together will affect reaction time more significantly overall.