Question

A patient has difficulty performing the mental rotation task. What are 2 possible disorders that the patient could have? And where would the lesions be for the 2 possible disorders?

The task would be to mentally rotate an upside down image of a person holding 2 balls (one red one white). The patient would need to rotate it so the person holding the ball is upright, so when asked which hand the red ball is in, they would be able to identify correctly. The activity is done twice, first time with the red ball in the left hand, and second time with the red ball in the right hand. The patient has difficulty in both cases.

Answer 1

The mental rotation task is a task of the imagination of how the object would look if it is rotated. It defines how strong is the correlation between reaction time(RT) and the rotation, RT is defined as the time between the presented stimuli and the response given.

According to Shepard and Metzler's mental images are similar to real images. When the images are rotated it takes longer for the subject to determine whether the image is the same or changed due to the change in the angle of the image.

The mental rotation task is done to calculate the spatial ability. Spatial ability is one's ability to mentally regenerate, transform, and rotate a visual image this is viewed as a unique type of intelligence.

The mental rotation task requires visual short term memory that stores the visual images for a short time but it carries some characteristics pertaining to the visual experience.

The person holding the ball in his hand is a 2-dimensional figure that is having height and width. When the picture is turned the angle is changed if the person is unable to recognize means his Spatial ability is affected and there will be longer RT.

This task is related to cognitive ability, the patients suffering from schizophrenia, and dementia suffer from mental task rotation these two are neurological associated disorders.

The schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery at the explicit and implicit level it is difficult for them to mentally rotate the object as the angle changes due to varied reaction time. They are slower and less accurate and the one who suffers from hallucination make more errors. The area of the brain affected are prefrontal and medial temporal lobe region that is involved in working memory.

Alzheimer's disease is the common cause of Dementia it the decline in mental ability that affects everyday life activities. They suffer from motor imagery and are unable to recognize the image when the angle of the image is changed they take longer reaction times and unable to accurately understand the object.

The hippocampus is affected due to damage to the nerve cells. It causes   memory loss and disorientation, The temporal lobe is affected in the rare case of dementia