Question

Cognitive Psychology- Mental Representation: Mental Rotation Experiment

a. Why did Shepard & Metzler’s (1971) findings suggest that the mental images were similar to real images?

b. In demonstrations like this, participants often report that they mentally rotate the objects in their minds in order to make their same/different judgments, so why did researchers decide to take reaction time measurements also?

c. What do you think was the purpose of using simple line drawings as experimental stimuli? How do you think the complexity of stimulus structure would affect your results?

Answer 1

1. The reachers concluded that mental images were similar to real images because their findings revealed that for all the participants, the time taken to confirm if two objects were identical, increased proportionally to the angular rotational difference between the real images.

2. The measurement of the reaction time was important in this case because from this data, the participants were able to conclude that the reaction time increased with greater rotational difference.Simply asking the participants if they mentally rotated objects in their mind would not have given this crucial information.

3. The purpose of using simple line drawings was to present stimuli that could be easily processed by the brain. Introducing complex stimuli would alter participants performance. For instance, those who have been previously exposed to the stimuli could show lesser reaction time. Or certain features of the complex stimuli might be disturbing.