Developmental Changes in the Interference of Motor Processes with Mental Rotation

Developmental Changes in the Interference of Motor Processes with Mental Rotation Andrea Frick (a.frick@psychologie.unizh.ch) Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Attenhoferstrasse 9, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland Moritz M. Daum 1 , (moritz.daum@cbs.mpg.de) Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Attenhoferstrasse 9, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland Simone Walser (simone.walser@gmx.net) Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Attenhoferstrasse 9, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland Fred W. Mast (f.mast@psychologie.unizh.ch) Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Treichlerstrasse 10, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland develop and which basic processes are involved. Piaget and Inhelder (1971) proposed a basic distinction between static and kinetic mental images. They suggested that imagery in the preoperational child remains essentially static, and therefore children are neither able to represent movements nor anticipate the results of movements or spatial transformations. According to Piaget and Inhelder (1971), it is not until the concrete operational stage, at about 7 to 8 years of age, that the child is able to use kinetic imagery, which is to represent movements of objects in space, manipulate mental images, or anticipate the outcome of events. However, Piaget’s methods, which largely relied on drawings, search tasks, and verbal reports, have been criticized repeatedly (e.g., Kosslyn, Margolis, Barrett, Goldknopf, & Daly, 1990; Marmor 1975), mainly because of the potential confound of performance and competence. Seeking more objective and quantitative measures, more recent developmental studies on mental imagery adopted a task developed by Shepard and his colleagues (Cooper & Shepard, 1973; Shepard & Metzler, 1971). In this paradigm, the subject is required to discriminate whether a rotated figure is exactly the same or a mirror image of the original upright figure. Shepard and Metzler (1971) demonstrated that the time adults required making this discrimination increased linearly with the angular difference in rotation. This suggests that the adults had mentally rotated one form into congruence with the other. Mental rotation studies with children demonstrated (Kosslyn et al., 1990; Marmor, 1975) that participants as young as 5 years old use mental rotation to solve the task, (i.e., their response times showed a linear increase with angular disparity of the two stimuli), but they do so at a Abstract Preceding studies with adult human subjects revealed that motor activities can influence mental rotation of body parts (e.g., hands) and abstract shapes. In this study, we investigated the influence of a rotational hand movement on mental rotation performance from a developmental perspective. Five-, eight-, and eleven-year-olds and adults were given a mental rotation task while they simultaneously rotated their hand (guided by a handle) about the same axis. The direction of the manual rotation was either compatible or incompatible with the direction of the mental rotation. As a baseline, children and adults performed the mental rotation task without concurrent hand movement. Response times increased with increasing stimulus orientation angle, indicating that subjects of all age groups used mental rotation to perform the task. Older age groups showed shorter response times. A differential influence of the direction of manual rotation on mental rotation was found for five-year- olds and eight-year-olds, but not for eleven-year-olds and adults. These results suggest that the ability to dissociate motor from visual mental processes increases with age. Keywords: cognitive development, children, imagery, mental rotation, motor processes Introduction Kinetic imagery in children In research on cognitive development, imagery abilities have been recognized as a highly important competence (Piaget & Inhelder, 1971). Despite this initial interest, few studies have investigated imagery in children. Therefore, to date there is little evidence about how imagery abilities Moritz M. Daum is now at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychology, Infant Cognition and Action, Amalienstrasse 33, 80799 Munich, Germany