Mental Rotation

Mental rotation tasks are difficult. In these tasks, you typically see at least three stimuli like in the example figure. The top one is the one that matches only one shown at the bottom. But the matching stimulus is rotated. Mental rotation time is the time it takes you to find which one matches. It is a well established fact that men and women perform differently on this task.

In this lesson, we are going to rotate 2-dimensional (2D) stimuli. 2D stimuli are those without depth (like in the figure below). Rotating stimuli with depth (3D) is more difficult than rotating 2D stimuli.

In the above screen shot, you see three two-dimensional stimuli. For this lesson, we use 2D stimuli because they are much easier to create.

The grey stimulus at the top is the one you need to match with one of the red ones. In order to match the grey stimulus, you need to imagine what it looks like when it is rotated. In this example, the right one matches, and thus needs to be clicked (as indicated by the little grey mouse cursor).

In the following demonstration, you will need to find out which two object match each other. You can only do that if you mentally rotate the objects and see which ones match. In this example, the stimuli are 2 dimensional, or 2D. In psychology, the most common mental rotation experiments have stimuli with depth, that is 3D.

At the end of the study, you can save your data. It is very easy to analyze using a simple spreadsheet program. The first column is the block you did, and you might want to discard the "training" trials (the first 5 rows).

The reaction time is in the 4th column. When the 5th column has value one, the participant responded correctly, and when it has value 2 the participant responded incorrectly.