How are bodies special? Effects of body features on spatial reasoning

Abstract

Embodied views of cognition argue that cognitive processes are influenced by bodily experience. This implies that when people make spatial judgments about human bodies, they bring to bear embodied knowledge that affects spatial reasoning performance. Here, we examined the specific contribution to spatial reasoning of visual features associated with the human body. We used two different tasks to elicit distinct visuospatial transformations: object-based transformations, as elicited in typical mental rotation tasks, and perspective transformations, used in tasks in which people deliberately adopt the egocentric perspective of another person. Body features facilitated performance in both tasks. This result suggests that observers are particularly sensitive to the presence of a human head and body, and that these features allow observers to quickly recognize and encode the spatial configuration of a figure. Contrary to prior reports, this facilitation was not related to the transformation component of task performance. These results suggest that body features facilitate task components other than spatial transformation, including the encoding of stimulus orientation.

Keywords:

• Perspective taking
• Spatial transformations
• Mental imagery

Notes

¹Overall, participants responded more slowly in this study than they did in Experiment 1. This could have come about as a result of deleting the coloured dot from the stimuli, or perhaps because only the same–different task was administered. However, we also noted that the proportion of male and female participants differed between Experiments 1 and 2. To test whether the difference in gender representation accounted for the overall RT difference, we performed an ANOVA on RT with gender and experiment number as independent variables. Both main effects were significant [sex: F(1, 57) = 26, p < .001; experiment: F(1, 57) = 35, p < .001], but the interaction was not, F(1, 57) = 2.3, p = .134. In a similar ANOVA with accuracy as the dependent variable, the main effect of sex was significant, F(1, 57) = 13, p = .001, while the main effect of experiment was not, F(1, 57) = 1.0, p = .329. The interaction was not significant, F(1, 57) = 0.1, p = .742. Thus, the different gender composition does not fully account for the slower performance in Experiment 2.