Mental rotation and the identification of disoriented objects.

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Abstract
The effects of stimulus orientation were compared across an object naming task and a left-right decision task using the same line drawing stimuli in a within-subjects design. The left-right task consisted of deciding whether an object shown in profile view faced left or right (when upright). The stimuli in both tasks were shown at various orientations by rotating the objects in the picture plane. The left-right task produced a large orientation effect on response time in which response time became increasingly longer as the objects were rotated further from upright. This pattern of results is consistent with the notion that visual representations of the objects are mentally-rotated until upright before the left-right decision is made. The effects of orientation on object naming, overall, were different than those observed in the left-right task. In particular, whereas response time increased monotonically from 0.degree. to 180.degree. in the left-right task, the increase in response time in the naming task was linear from 0.degree. to 120.degree. but then decreased from 120.degree. to 180.degree. in the naming task. However, the slopes of the orientation effect on response times were similar across the two tasks between 0.degree. and 120.degree.. Overall, the results suggest that two mechanisms are involved in the naming task, one of which is more sensitive to orientation effects than the other. In contrast, a single mechanism is sufficient to account for the orientation effects on left-right decisions. Furthermore, the results suggest the possibility that one of the mechanisms underlying the effects of orientation on object naming time may be mental rotation.

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