Lab report – Mental Rotation task
Szabó Anett Zsuzsanna (EEMRDO)
Introduction
The Mental Rotation task (Shepard & Metzler, 1971) was designed to measure the
required time participants need to determine whether the two three-dimensional objects
they can observe are congruent. The objects were chosen carefully in such a way that
participants must use mental rotation to solve the problem, excluding other strategies.
It was found that reaction time increases linearly with the angular difference.
Another study found that there is a significant sex difference, favoring males in this and
also other tasks including spatial abilities (Voyer et al., 1995). The magnitude of these
differences seems to decrease. The sex difference is not dependent on whether the
stimuli are two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects (Collins & Kimura, 1997).
In this experiment we could not collect data about the sex of the participants. Thus, we
expect that the reaction time and the number of correct answers linearly correlated.
Methods
Participants. The task was administered on 19 participants (sex and exact age
unknown) from the population of Ba psychology students at Eötvös Loránd University.
Materials and Procedure. We used the Mental Rotation task (Mental Rotation
Task, n.d.).
In the task, participants see one gray (above) and two red (under) objects in each trial.
The participants need to decide which one of the red objects is congruent with the gray
one, except it is rotated on one axis. First there is a practice round of five trials then it is
followed by the ten test trials. The task gives positive (“Correct!) or negative (“Wrong!”)
feedback directly after each trial based on the participant’s performance. Reaction time
is measured while completing the task.
Results
We observed an increasing trend in the average rection time.
According to the trend, an increasing linear function was fitted and visualized between
the percentage of correct answers and the average reaction time (Figure 1), which
showed a considerable deviation from this fitted function.
Figure 1. The avarage reaction time increases as the percatage of the correct
answers rises. Contrary to the increasing trend, no unequivocal linear connection can
be observed between the percentage of correct answers and average reaction time due to
the considerable error of the linear function fitting. Almost half of the participants
(47%) has made only one mistake completing the task.
Discussion
The results are in line with our expectations. As the percentage of correct answers
increases the required time to complete the task increases as well. It can be explained by
the participants’ mental work process was longer to get more favorable outcomes. It is
also a possibility that said participants were reluctant to make mistakes while
completing the task.
One of the limitations is that the task chosen can be solved by other strategies than
mental rotation, for instance, by discrimination. It would be interesting to test whether
diverse strategies lead to distinct results. Due to the lack of data collected we could not
separate the participants into two groups based on the strategy used as merely two
participants chose mental rotation over discrimination.
References
Collins, D. W., & Kimura, D. (1997). A large sex difference on a two-dimensional mental
rotation task. Behavioral Neuroscience, 111(4), 845–849.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7044.111.4.845
Mental rotation task. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2023, from
https://www.psytoolkit.org/library/mentalrotation.html
Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects.
Science, 171(3972), 701–703. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.171.3972.701
Voyer, D., Voyer, S., & Bryden, M. P. (1995). Magnitude of sex differences in spatial
abilities: A meta-analysis and consideration of critical variables. Psychological
Bulletin, 117(2), 250–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.2.250
