Mental rotation & mirror image recognition in blinds, blindfolded, and sighted

Abstract

How the spatial information is coded and processed is one of the frequently researched subjects in cognitive science. For a rather long time there has been a hard debate about whether the object representation is analogue or propositional. One of the well-known experiments measuring how the spatial information is recognized is the mental rotation experiment. Mental rotation is based on the idea that if a shape is presented insome orientation other than its canonical one, the observer might compensate by an act of mental rotation. The viewpoint dependence in visual and haptic object recognition were studied analyzing whether the correct response times are changing with the orientation angles of the rotated objects. The experiment was performed on subjects who were sighted, blindfolded and the congenitally blinds. Thus, the tactile mental rotation concept and whether visual information is required in mirror image recognition and in mentalrotation process were investigated. The subjects were asked which one was the mirror image of the standard object among three simultaneous presented stimuli. All three groupsof subjects, sighted, blindfolded, and blinds, were recognized the mirror image of theobjects well regardless of its orientations. However, while the sighted and blindfolded subjects did not use mental rotation strategy, the blind subjects reflected mental rotation like process when they tried to find the mirror image of the standard object. Accuracy, speed of the response times, congruency effect, linearity effect, and uprighting process were analyzed in the present study in order to discover the common and differential structural mechanism underlying tactile and visual object recognition.|Keywords: Object Recognition; Tactile and Visual Mental Rotation