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Mental Rotation of Images

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Abstract The idea of mental imagery has always been a controversial subject in the field of psychology. Many psychologists have argued that such a concept is impossible to measure because it can not be directly observed. Though they are right about this, it is not impossible to measure how quickly mental rotations of images are processed in our brains. Subjects in this experiment were presented two shapes simultaneously, via computer screen, and asked to make judgement, as quickly as possible, as to whether the two shapes presented were the same or mirror images. Two different shapes were used in this experiment, each given as often as the other. During each trial one shape remained stationary and the other was rotated with varying …show more content…

Overall, when comparing the reaction times of pictures to letters, picture reaction times are said to be generally greater. In conducting this experiment 20 right-handed subjects were used, 10 male and 10 female. Subjects participated in this study either to earn course credit, or for payment of ten dollars per hour. Three things were concluded from this experiment. First, picture rotations took longer to perform than letter rotations. Second, there were no sex differences in reaction times for either stimulus presented, and third, there was a linear increase in reaction times as angular disparity of both stimuli sets increased (Desrocher, smith & Taylor, 1995). As predicted this study did replicate some previous findings. However, based on the data from this experiment sex differences did not yield a significant difference in reaction times when presented with the different stimuli. Concurrent with our data, both of the previously mentioned experiments concluded the same thing; reaction times increased as angular disparity increased. Although the objectives in each experiment were somewhat different, there has been a sufficient amount of evidence to support the hypothesis, that reaction times will increase as the angular disparity of objects increase. Method Participants Ten St. Johns University undergraduate students participated in this experiment to fulfill their Research Method

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