Children's performance in mental rotation tasks: orientation-free features flatten the slope

Studies of the development of mental rotation have yielded conflicting results, apparently because different mental rotation tasks draw on different cognitive abilities. Children may compare two stimuli at different orientations without mental rotation if the stimuli contain orientation-free features. Two groups of children (78 6-year-olds and 92 8-year-olds) participated in an experiment investigating development of the ability to mentally rotate and the ability to recognize and use orientation-free features. Children compared two stimuli, one upright and one rotated, and responded as quickly as possible indicating whether the stimuli were the same or different. The stimuli were either two panda bears or two ice-cream cones with three scoops of ice-cream of different colors. The panda bears were either identical or mirror images. The cones were either identical, mirror images, or non-mirror images. Response times increased linearly as a function of the angle of orientation when stimuli were the same and when the stimuli were mirror images. But response times were much less dependent on angle of orientation for non-mirror image stimuli. Children as young as 6 years recognized orientation-free stimulus features and responded without mentally rotating when the task permitted this strategy.     

Are conjunctive inferences easier than disjunctive inferences? A comparison of rules and models

We report four experiments investigating conjunctive inferences (from a conjunction and two conditional premises) and disjunctive inferences (from a disjunction and the same two conditionals). The mental model theory predicts that the conjunctive inferences, which require one model, should be easier than the disjunctive inferences, which require multiple models. Formal rule theories predict either the opposite result or no difference between the inferences. The experiments showed that the inferences were equally easy when the participants evaluated given conclusions, but that the conjunctive inferences were easier than the disjunctive inferences (1) when the participants drew their own conclusions, (2) when the conjunction and disjunction came last in the premises, (3) in the time the participants spent reading the premises and in responding to given conclusions, and (4) in their ratings of the difficulty of the inferences. The results support the model theory and demonstrate the importance of reasoners' inferential strategies.     

Can mental rotation begin before perception finishes?

We conducted six experiments to determine if mental rotation can begin before perception finishes, as allowed by continuous flow models but not discrete stage models of information processing. The results of Experiments 1–3 showed that the effect of shape discriminability on RT was underadditive with the effect of stimulus orientation, suggesting that mental rotation began before shape discrimination had finished and that the two processes overlapped in time. The results of Experiments 4–6 indicated that mental rotation can overlap with color discriminations as well. In both sets of experiments, however, the amount of underadditivity tended to be much less than predicted by models allowing interference-free overlap. This suggests that mental rotation can overlap with perceptual analysis, contrary to fully discrete models, but that little rotation is carried out during this overlap due to interference between simultaneous discrimination and rotation processes.     

The role of self-to-object updating in orientation-free performance on spatial-memory tasks

A single view of a room-sized path produces an orientation-specific memory representation, yet when memory is tested at a location on the path, orientation-free performance is observed. Either a virtual-views or an updating hypothesis can account for orientation-free performance by attributing it, respectively, to an orientation-free long-term-memory representation or to a working-memory representation of the body's updated location relative to the path. Experiments 1 and 2 test these hypotheses by manipulating the test-site location and the complexity of the trajectory from the study site to the test site. Experiment 3 tests orientation to the test space as a function of trajectory complexity. Results support a virtual-views explanation for the orientation-free performance of males and an updating explanation for females.     

Nonholistic processing in mental rotation: Some suggestive evidence

A series of experiments, using a modification of the Shepard and Metzler mental rotation task, was performed to investigate Shepard’s “holistic rotation” hypothesis. Effective figural complexity was manipulated in the experiments in two distinct ways. In one manipulation, blocks were added to the standard 10-blockfigures. In the other manipulation, the figures used and the direction of angular rotation were restricted so that some featural information in the figures was redundant, that is, unnecessary for the discrimination task at hand. There were two major conclusions. First, when figural complexity is effectively manipulated, it has a powerful effect on the “speed of mental rotation,” as measured by the slope of the curve relating reaction time to angular disparity. Second, it is possible, by ignoring featural redundancy, to construct experimental paradigms in which “complexity” of figures is apparently manipulated but has no effect on speed of mental rotation. This fact provides a possible explanation of why some previous experiments have failed to find a complexity effect in mental rotation.     

Seeking positive experiences can produce illusory correlations

Individuals tend to select again alternatives about which they have positive impressions and to avoid alternatives about which they have negative impressions. Here we show how this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process leads to the emergence of an illusory correlation between estimates of the attributes of multi-attribute alternatives. The sign of the illusory correlation depends on how the decision maker combines estimates in making her sampling decisions. A positive illusory correlation emerges when evaluations are compensatory or disjunctive and a negative illusory correlation can emerge when evaluations are conjunctive. Our theory provides an alternative explanation for illusory correlations that does not rely on biased information processing nor selective attention to different pieces of information. It provides a new perspective on several well-established empirical phenomena such as the ‘Halo’ effect in personality perception, the relation between proximity and attitudes, and the in-group out-group bias in stereotype formation.     

Two Routes to Expertise in Mental Rotation

The ability to imagine objects undergoing rotation (mental rotation) improves markedly with practice, but an explanation of this plasticity remains controversial. Some researchers propose that practice speeds up the rate of a general‐purpose rotation algorithm. Others maintain that performance improvements arise through the adoption of a new cognitive strategy—repeated exposure leads to rapid retrieval from memory of the required response to familiar mental rotation stimuli. In two experiments we provide support for an integrated explanation of practice effects in mental rotation by combining behavioral and EEG measures in a way that provides more rigorous inference than is available from either measure alone. Before practice, participants displayed two well‐established signatures of mental rotation: Both response time and EEG negativity increased linearly with rotation angle. After extensive practice with a small set of stimuli, both signatures of mental rotation had all but disappeared. In contrast, after the same amount of practice with a much larger set both signatures remained, even though performance improved markedly. Taken together, these results constitute a reversed association, which cannot arise from variation in a single cause, and so they provide compelling evidence for the existence of two routes to expertise in mental rotation. We also found novel evidence that practice with the large but not the small stimulus set increased the magnitude of an early visual evoked potential, suggesting increased rotation speed is enabled by improved efficiency in extracting three‐dimensional information from two‐dimensional stimuli.     

Spatial frequencies in short-term memory for faces: A test of three frequency-dependent hypotheses

Spatial frequency manipulations have been shown to have significant utility in ascertaining the various types of information that might be important in object identification and recognition tasks. This utility suggests that, given some mapping between ranges of spatial frequencies and different types of psychological information, it should be possible to examine the roles of these different types of psychological information by way of spatial frequency manipulations. One potential problem, however, is that there is no well-specified, unambiguous mapping between the distinctions in the frequency domain and the distinctions in the informational domain. Three experiments provide tests of three general hypotheses regarding the ways in which different spatial frequencies might map to different information in facial perception and memory tasks: (1) the low-frequency dominance hypothesis, which proposes that low-frequency information should be superior (to high-frequency information) as a cue to perception and memory; (2) the distinct informational roles hypothesis, which holds that high spatial frequencies should carry featural information while low spatial frequencies should carry information about the configuration of those features; and (3) the task-dependent information hypothesis, which suggests that high-frequency information should be best suited to discrimination tasks while low-frequency information should be best suited for recognition tasks. Results generally contradict the first two of these hypotheses, while providing support for the third. Implications with regard to the various issues related to the mapping between spatial frequencies and the informational content of faces, as well as the need to consider important interactions among perceptual and memory processes, are discussed.     

从表征和认知过程上看表象与知觉、记忆的关系

表象、知觉和记忆是一个整合的认知系统。由于知觉和记忆提供了表象生成的材料,因而三者共享相似的表征,并激活广泛而相似的脑区。然而在认知加工过程上三者存在一定的差异。与知觉相比,表象的编码方式更抽象、更依赖过去经验的参与且处理细节能力更弱;与记忆相比,表象更容易受无关信息的干扰。未来对三者关系的研究应关注不同来源和不同类型的表象与知觉、记忆之间的关系,以及工作记忆在三者关系中所起的作用。     

Mental rotation is not easily cognitively penetrable

When participants take part in mental imagery experiments, are they using their “tacit knowledge” of perception to mimic what they believe should occur in the corresponding perceptual task? Two experiments were conducted to examine whether such an account can be applied to mental imagery in general. These experiments both examined tasks that required participants to “mentally rotate” stimuli. In Experiment 1, instructions led participants to believe that they could reorient shapes in one step or avoid reorienting the shapes altogether. Regardless of instruction type, response times increased linearly with increasing rotation angles. In Experiment 2, participants first observed novel objects rotating at different speeds, and then performed a mental rotation task with those objects. The speed of perceptually demonstrated rotation did not affect the speed of mental rotation. We argue that tacit knowledge cannot explain mental imagery results in general, and that in particular the mental rotation effect reflects the nature of the underlying internal representation and processes that transform it, rather than participants’ pre-existing knowledge.     

Object- and direction-specific interference between manual and mental rotation

We conducted a series of psychophysical experiments to investigate the nature and specificity of behavioral interference between mental and manual rotation. Participants were asked to mentally rotate five different types of visual stimuli--hands, faces, tools, cubes, and natural objects--either clockwise or counterclockwise while they simultaneously manually rotated a wheel in the concordant or discordant direction. Our study clearly revealed object-specific interference between manual and mental rotation. In comparison with a neutral baseline condition without any manual rotation, both manual rotation directions generally impaired the mental rotation of cubes. In contrast, the mental rotation of hands was impaired only by discordant manual rotation. This object- and direction-specific interference between manual and mental rotation proved to be independent of task difficulty. We furthermore found an angular distance effect across different stimulus types.     

Learning efficient visual search for stimuli containing diagnostic spatial configurations and color-shape conjunctions

Visual search is often slow and difficult for complex stimuli such as feature conjunctions. Search efficiency, however, can improve with training. Search for stimuli that can be identified by the spatial configuration of two elements (e.g., the relative position of two colored shapes) improves dramatically within a few hundred trials of practice. Several recent imaging studies have identified neural correlates of this learning, but it remains unclear what stimulus properties participants learn to use to search efficiently. Influential models, such as reverse hierarchy theory, propose two major possibilities: learning to use information contained in low-level image statistics (e.g., single features at particular retinotopic locations) or in high-level characteristics (e.g., feature conjunctions) of the task-relevant stimuli. In a series of experiments, we tested these two hypotheses, which make different predictions about the effect of various stimulus manipulations after training. We find relatively small effects of manipulating low-level properties of the stimuli (e.g., changing their retinotopic location) and some conjunctive properties (e.g., color-position), whereas the effects of manipulating other conjunctive properties (e.g., color-shape) are larger. Overall, the findings suggest conjunction learning involving such stimuli might be an emergent phenomenon that reflects multiple different learning processes, each of which capitalizes on different types of information contained in the stimuli. We also show that both targets and distractors are learned, and that reversing learned target and distractor identities impairs performance. This suggests that participants do not merely learn to discriminate target and distractor stimuli, they also learn stimulus identity mappings that contribute to performance improvements.     

The Role of Negation in Conditional Inference

This paper addresses the issue of how negative components affect people's ability to draw conditional inferences. The study was motivated by an attempt to resolve a difficulty for the mental models theory of Johnson-Laird and Byrne, whose account of matching bias in the selection task is apparently inconsistent with Johnson-Laird's explanation of the double negation effects in conditional inference reported by Evans, Clibbens, and Rood (1995). Two experiments are reported, which investigate frequencies of conditional inferences with task presentation similar to that of the selection task in two respects: the presence of a picture of four cards and the use of implicit negations in the premises. The latter variable was shown to be critical and demonstrated a new phenomenon: Conditional inferences of all kinds are substantially suppressed when based on implicitly negative premises. This phenomenon was shown to operate independently of and in addition to the double negation effect. A third experiment showed that the implicit negation effect could be extended to the paradigm in which people are asked to produce their own conclusions. It is argued that these two effects can be explained within either the mental models theory or the inference rule theory, of propositional reasoning, but that each will require some revision in order to offer a convincing account.     

Reflections on dynamics,adaptation and control: A cognitive architecture for mental models

In this paper, an overview of the wide variety of occurrences of mental models in the literature is discussed. They are classified according to two dimensions obtaining four categories of them: static-dynamic and world-mental, where static refers to mental models for static world states or for static mental states and dynamic refers to mental models for world processes or for mental processes. In addition, distinctions are made for what can be done by mental models: they can, for example, be (1) used for internal simulation, they can be (2) adapted, and these processes can be (3) controlled. This leads to a global three-level cognitive architecture covering these three ways of handling mental models. It is discussed that in this cognitive architecture reflection principles play an important role to define the interactions between the different levels.     

For the mind’s eye the world is two-dimensional

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 imagined objects, actual photographs, and imagined photographs, the direction in which the objects pointed followed the observer, regardless of his or her vantage point. The results from this study extend the rotation effect, typically found in pictures, to the domain of mental imagery. We found the rotation effect in pictures and mental images alike, but not in direct perception of 3-D objects; thus, we provide evidence that mental images share main characteristics of 2-D pictures.     

An ecological analysis of binocular vision

Summary Underlying the classic binocularity problems of singleness and three-dimensionality is a theory that the stimulus for binocular vision constitutes two two-dimensional images and metric differences between parts of those images. This characterization of the stimulus is criticized here and in its stead an ecologically-based characterization is presented wherein a binocular transformational invariant is shown to specify absolute (body-scaled) size, shape, and distance. The transformation is characterized as a rotation and its specificity to distance assumes a constant interocular distance and either homogeneously textured or extended surfaces. Four experiments demonstrate perceivers' abilities to detect this information and report (verbally or by reaching) the absolute distances of surfaces in stereograms. A fifth experiment revealed that accurate performance did not depend on oculomotor information. The assumptions of texture extent and distribution and constant interocular distance and their possible violations were discussed. A sixth experiment demonstrated that violations of interocular distance are absorbed by surface shapes. The existence and detection of a binocular rotation dissolves the putative problems of singleness and stereopsis, indicates that the importance of having two frontal eyes is for perception of absolute distance, and reformulates the problems for an algorithmic (physiological) theory of vision.     

视觉表象操作加工的眼动实验研究

本研究通过视觉表象旋转和扫描的眼动实验探讨表象的心理表征方式。实验一结果表明,眼动指标具有与反应时相类似的旋转角度效应。实验二结果显示,表象扫描的反应时和眼动指标都具有与知觉扫描加工一样的距离效应。由此可以认为,表象眼动与知觉眼动模式具有相似性;表象具有相对独立的心理表征方式并有其特殊的加工过程;表象的心理表征可以是形象表征,而非一定是抽象的命题或符号表征     

说明心理学的形态、特征与评析

说明心理学以心理、行为现象背后的本质、规律、发生机制的说明为己任,其发展先后呈现出心理-心物关系的说明、刺激-反应关系的说明、认知心理-神经机制的说明、进化心理机制的说明等形态,在方法论上则带有鲜明的科学主义特征。它致力于人的自然本性的研究,构筑了作为自然科学的心理学样态,与理解心理学一道推动了心理学的独立、成熟。未来心理学还需摒弃蕴含于说明心理学与理解心理学之中的非此即彼的思维方式,确立心理学的整合视野。     

Can we imagine how objects look from other viewpoints?

Many psychologists who study cognition believe that perception achieves object-centered representations that make it possible to extract representations of how the object would appear from differing viewpoints. Others believe we can achieve representations of how an object would appear by a process of visualization or mental rotation. We report experiments in which the subject tries to imagine how three-dimensional novel wire objects would appear from positions other than the one they are in. Subjects are unable to perform this task unless they make use of strategies that circumvent the process of visualization. It is suggested that the linear increase in time required to succeed in mental rotation tasks as a function of the angular discrepancy between the figures compared is the result of increasing difficulty rather than of the time required for rotation.     

Neural synergy between kinetic vision and touch

Ambiguous visual information often produces unstable visual perception. In four psychophysical experiments, we found that unambiguous tactile information about the direction of rotation of a globe whose three-dimensional structure is ambiguous significantly influences visual perception of the globe. This disambiguation of vision by touch occurs only when the two modalities are stimulated concurrently, however. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we discovered that touching the rotating globe, even when not looking at it, reliably activates the middle temporal visual area (MT+), a brain region commonly thought to be crucially involved in registering structure from motion. Considered together, our results show that the brain draws on somatosensory information to resolve visual conflict.