page_title: Roger Shepard
section_title: Mental rotation
hierarchical_section_title: Roger Shepard / Research / Mental rotation
caption_attribution_description: English: Created by Jennifer Oneske for use on wikipedia
context_page_description: Roger Newland Shepard is an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization". He is considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be apprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.
context_section_description: Inspired by a dream of three-dimensional objects rotating in space, Shepard began in 1968 to design experiments to measure mental rotation. (Mental rotation involves "imagining how a two- or three-dimensional object would look if rotated away from its original upright position.")
  The early experiments, in collaboration with Jacqueline Metzler, used perspective drawings of very abstract objects: "ten solid cubes attached face-to-face to form a rigid armlike structure with exactly three right-angled 'elbows,'" to quote their 1971 paper, the first report of this research.
  Shepard and Metzler were able to measure the speed with which subjects could imagine rotating these complicated objects. Later work by Shepard with Lynn A. Cooper illuminated the process of mental rotation further. Shepard and Cooper also collaborated on a 1982 book (revised 1986) summarizing past work on mental rotation and other transformations of mental images.
  
  Reviewing that work in 1983, Michael Kubovy assessed its importance:
  Up to that day in 1968 [Shepard's dream about rotating objects], mental transformations were no more accessible to psychological experimentation than were any other so-called private experiences. Shepard transformed a compelling and familiar experience into an experimentally tractable problem by injecting it into a problem-task that admits of a correct and incorrect answer.
caption: Mental rotation task. Cube assemblages based on test drawings used by Shepard and Metzler. Two-dimensional figures similar to those used in work by Shepard and Cooper.
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