Effective Rotations: Action Effects Determine the Interplay of Mental and Manual Rotations

The last decades have seen a growing interest in the impact of action on perception and other concurrent cognitive processes. One particularly interesting example is that manual rotation actions facilitate mental rotations in the same direction. The present study extends this research in two fundame...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. General 2012-08, Vol.141 (3), p.489-501
Main Authors: Janczyk, Markus, Pfister, Roland, Crognale, Michael A., Kunde, Wilfried
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Adult
Aviation
Aviation Technology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Experimental psychology
Female
Foreign Countries
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Germany
Human
Humans
Imagery
Imagination - physiology
Interaction
Male
Mental Rotation
Motor ability
Motor Processes
Movement - physiology
Object Manipulation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychomotor activities
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Rotation
Simulation
Space Perception - physiology
Spatial Ability
Undergraduate Students
Visualization
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Summary:The last decades have seen a growing interest in the impact of action on perception and other concurrent cognitive processes. One particularly interesting example is that manual rotation actions facilitate mental rotations in the same direction. The present study extends this research in two fundamental ways. First, Experiment 1 demonstrates that not only manual rotations facilitate mental rotations but that mental rotations also facilitate subsequent manual rotations. Second, Experiments 2 and 3 targeted the mechanisms underlying this interplay. Here, manual steering wheel rotations produced salient visual effects, namely the rotation of either a plane or a horizon in an aviation display. The rotation direction of these visual effects either did or did not correspond to the direction of the manual rotation itself. These experiments clearly demonstrate an impact of sensory action effects: Mental rotations facilitate manual rotations with visual effects of the same direction (as the mental rotation), irrespective of the direction of the manual rotation. These findings highlight the importance of effect anticipation in action planning. As such they support the contentions of ideomotor theory and shed new light on the cognitive source of the interplay between visual imagery and motor control.
ISSN:0096-3445
1939-2222
DOI:10.1037/a0026997