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Mental Rotation Experiment Essay

1939 Words8 Pages

Title: Mental Rotation Experiment: The effect of Gender on Mental Rotation Reaction Time

Introduction:
Mental rotation is an important function of visual representation in the human brain when dealing with misoriented stimuli, which is the ability to rotate two and three-dimensional objects in one’s mind. In everyday life, people’s ability to recognize faces and objects from unconventional perspectives stems from their ability to mentally rotate objects. The earliest experiment to research on the concept of mental rotation was by Shepard and Metzler (1971). In the classic experiment, participants were presented with drawings of pairs of two-dimensional figures and three-dimensional cubes that were asymmetrically assembled. Each pair were either …show more content…

Although the accuracy was part of the measurement, the data analyzed only includes reaction time. Therefore, the similar average reaction time between male and female could be due to the difference in accuracy. For example, fast reaction time could have easily been achieved by continuously pressing the same response for every trail. Consequently, the reaction time would be as fast, but the accuracy would be very low. However the finding will not have reflected this important factor. Secondly, because the experiment was conducted online, it is not clear whether the participants actually read and followed the instructions. Prior to the trails, the instructions reminded the participants that “accuracy is more important than speed”. It is possible that the participants missed the instructions and tried to strive for better reaction times rather than accuracy. In addition, the sample size was relatively small compared to the previous experiments which could be another confounding factor.

One possible direction for future study is to examine the effects of different visual stimuli used on the performance of MRT. In Shepard and Metzler’s experiment the visual stimuli used were assemblages of cubes. Whereas this experiment uses black figures. The difference in visual stimuli may have affected the participant’s processing of the figure. The cubes could be potentially easier to mentally rotate one figure to see whether it could be mapped onto the other, since the cubes could be counted. Whereas, the black figures used in this experiment are more ambiguous in

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