Research reportMental rotation of tactile stimuli
Introduction
Shepard and Metzler [43] first presented evidence for the cognitive process of mental rotation. Their subjects viewed drawings of variously oriented three-dimensional objects, consisting of cubes stacked face-to-face. The task was to decide if the two objects presented in each trial were identical or mirror-images of each other. Subjects reported turning the objects in their minds to accomplish the task. Moreover, reaction times (RTs) rose linearly with increased angular disparity between the two objects depicted. Both the RT data and the introspective reports were consistent with the notion that subjects formed mental images of the objects and rotated one of them at a fixed rate until it was in congruence with the other. Hence, a new paradigm for studying complex mental processing emerged. Evidence of mental rotation, in the form of monotonically increasing RT as a function of angular disparity of the stimuli, was subsequently found in visual tasks using stimuli other than the originally used cube-assemblies [43], such as alphanumeric characters [13], [47] and pictures of the body, hands and feet [3], [29], [30]. Mental rotation has been evoked both during tasks requiring one stimulus to be compared against some previously memorized standard [3], [13], [29], [30], [47] and in tasks where two stimuli are to be compared against each other [43]. Explicit instructions to use a mental rotation strategy produced the same general RT profile as tasks where no such instruction was given [1], [12], [24], [37]. Almost all these tasks required mirror-image discrimination of the stimuli.
Studies using functional neuro-imaging and event-related potentials (ERPs) have shown that mental rotation of visual stimuli activates areas of occipital, frontal, and parietal cortex. The rotation process itself, usually isolated through subtraction of activity due to mirror-image discrimination (at zero angular disparity) from rotation task activity or by the analysis of particular epochs of the trial during which mental rotation occurs, seems to particularly involve parietal cortex [2], [3], [12], [17], [24], [31], [33], [37], [46], [47]. Other cortical areas are also implicated. Specifically, inferior parietal cortex, postero-superior parietal cortex, mid-ventrolateral frontal cortex, medial frontal cortex and extrastriate occipital cortex have been identified as being selectively more active during the mental rotation process than the mirror-image discrimination process [2], [3], [12], [24], [31], [47]. Mental rotation studies presenting visual depictions of hands also report extensive activity in motor regions including primary motor, premotor and supplementary motor cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum [3], [24], [31]. This is consistent with the idea that subjects imagine rotating their own body parts when presented with such stimuli, but imagine rotating an external object when presented with other kinds of stimuli. Activity has been reported in the head of the caudate nucleus [2], and in premotor and primary somatosensory cortex [12] during some mental rotation tasks presenting visual stimuli that do not represent body parts, raising the possibility of somatic sensorimotor imagery even for such stimuli.
These studies offer insight into the mental rotation of visually presented stimuli. An interesting question is to what extent the findings reflect modality-specific transformations. Does mental rotation depend upon processing in visual regions of the brain? Does the neural basis for mental rotation differ between modalities? To address these issues, mental rotation has been investigated using tactile stimuli. The following is a brief review of studies of this sort. In the remainder of the article, mental rotation of cutaneous stimuli under both passive and active (haptic exploration) conditions will be referred to as ‘tactile mental rotation’. At the end of the article, we present an experiment from our laboratory that addresses the nature of the reference frames used in mental rotation of tactile stimuli.
Section snippets
Stimuli
A number of different tactile stimuli have been utilized in studies of tactile mental rotation. Although the stimuli were three-dimensional, the relevant stimulus information was generally contained in only two dimensions. For example, the tactile stimuli used by Marmor and Zaback [25] were flat geometric shapes that resembled an ice cream cone with a bite out of one side of the scoop. The objects had a uniform thickness, so that the relevant shape information was contained in the other two
Brain regions involved
ERP studies have provided the best evidence to date for the neural basis of tactile mental rotation. Röder et al. [36] tested normal subjects using patterned tactile displays composed of discrete circular elements (resembling Braille dots). Their task design allowed them to separate stimulus encoding from mental rotation. In the first phase of the trial, subjects explored a tactile stimulus for a finite period of time. Then, after an auditory cue, the subjects mentally rotated the memorized
Dependence of tactile mental rotation on visual processing
Subjects engaging in visual mental rotation tasks report rotating the objects in their minds [43]. As there can be a strong visual component to this experience, researchers sought to determine if mental rotation depends on the visual modality or simply on a general, non-visual process of spatial imagery. While the ERP studies discussed above [36], [38] implicate parietal but not occipital cortex in tactile mental rotation in normal subjects, this does not rule out the possibility that tactile
Reference frames of tactile stimuli
When one perceives a tactually presented pattern, one assigns to it certain axes, to enable characterizing its top and bottom, front and back, left and right, etc. These axes create a frame of reference within which the tactile pattern is interpreted. This assignment process is complex and may depend on a number of different spatial factors, causing tactually applied letters to be perceived as mirror-reversed under certain conditions. For example, Oldfield and Phillips [28] reported that
Current investigation: does tactile mental rotation use a hand-centered coordinate system?
We carried out an experiment in our laboratory to address the nature of the reference frame within which tactile stimuli in the horizontal plane are mentally rotated. A preliminary report of the experiment has been presented [8].
Conclusions
The similar results of tactile and visual mental rotation studies suggest that mental rotation is a process which depends upon spatial imagery and analysis that need not be modality-specific. However, the fact that sighted and adventitiously blind subjects are superior to the congenitally blind suggests that there is a distinct advantage to using visual processing or imagery in mental transformation of tactile stimuli. Moreover, it is clear that tactile stimuli are often interpreted, not in
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant to KS from the National Eye Institute (RO1 EY 12441) and by an ARCS award to SCP.
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2022, CortexCitation Excerpt :The premotor cortex, largely found to be involved in mental rotation of hands (Creem et al., 2001; Perruchoud et al., 2016; Vingerhoets et al., 2002; Zapparoli et al., 2014), was also related to motor intention and preparation, necessary for the internal simulation of motor action of rotation of one's own hands (Ecker et al., 2006; Kashuk et al., 2017; Seurinck et al., 2005). Based on the comparisons of activation in the premotor cortex between haptic and visual stimuli shown in Table 4, the higher involvement of the premotor cortex in haptic mental rotation of hands suggests that this task might rely more on the use of motor imagery strategies and on a stronger adoption of a first-person frame of reference compared to visual stimuli (Kitada et al., 2010; Prather & Sathian, 2002). Furthermore, similar to sensorimotor regions, even low Rotations of haptic stimuli were sufficient to activate the premotor cortex, suggesting prompt embodiment of haptic stimuli at any rotation, not observed for visual stimuli.
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2009, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :On the other hand, hand-centered reference frame predictions were successful in capturing the directionality of the shifting response time function, although also in this case the observed phase shift diverged from the predicted ones. On the basis of these observations we discarded any explanation that involves an exclusive use of a particular reference frame, in contrast to Carpenter and Eisenberg (1978) and Prather and Sathian (2002). Rather, we interpreted the phase shifts of the response time function as a product of the interplay of the allocentric, the hand-centered and the body-centered reference frames.
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