Elsevier

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 19, Issue 2, April 1987, Pages 178-241
Cognitive Psychology

Imagined spatial transformations of one's hands and feet

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Abstract

These experiments examine two related phenomena: (a) the judgment of whether a human body part belongs to the left or right half of the body and (b) the imagined spatial transformation of part of one's body. In three of the experiments, participants made left-right judgments of a hand or foot. They apparently made this judgment by imagining their own hand or foot passing to the orientation of the stimulus for comparison. Time for (a) left-right judgments and (b) corresponding imagined spatial transformations depended on the extent of the orientation difference between the stimulus and the task or “canonical” orientation of the subject's hand (or foot). More important, time for (a) and (b) depended strongly, and in the same way, on the direction of this orientation difference. RT increased with implicit awkwardness of stimulus orientation (i.e., extent of anatomical and physiological constraints on movement to that stimulus orientation). Familiarity with the hand (and foot) in some nonawkward orientations reduced RT (or increased the rate of imagined spatial transformation). However, the effect of implicit awkwardness was more often apparently due to differences in extent of imagined paths for awkward and nonawkward orientations. Paths of efficient length were apparently imagined to nonawkward orientations, and rather inefficient paths were imagined to awkward orientations. These imagined paths seemed to simulate the paths used for physically moving the hand or foot between their task orientation and the orientation of the stimulus. These results and others suggest that kinematic and temporal properties of imagined spatial transformations are more object-specific in nature than could be previously assumed.

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    Research was supported by NSF Grant BNS 79-24062 to James L. McClelland; Contract N00014-79-C-0323, NR 667-437 with Personal and Training Research Programs of the Office of Naval Research, and a grant from System Development Foundation. Manuscript prepared with a grant from A. P. Sloan Foundation Program in Cognitive Science to MIT Center for Cognitive Science and NRSA Fellowship F32 HD6605-01 from National Institutes of Health. The article is based on a doctoral dissertation for the Department of Psychology at University of California, San Diego, and was presented in part at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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