Does mental rotation ability depend on sensory-specific experience?

Abstract

No study has investigated the link between vision and touch with respect to spatial abilities using a within-subjects design. With this design, we compared participants’ tactile and visual mental rotation abilities, as measured by the Mental Rotations Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978). Participants in four groups completed two consecutive sessions under no-switch (visual-visual or tactile-tactile) or switch conditions (visual-tactile or tactile-visual) to determine whether mental rotation abilities assessed in Session 2 depend on previous sensory-specific experiences (Session 1). Analysis of response accuracy revealed that all groups improved their performance in Session 2. Analysis of response time showed an improvement in visual and tactile performance during Session 2 for participants who first performed the task with the same modality. No effect of task repetition appeared for participants who performed in two different sensory conditions. These results reveal that mental rotation ability partly depends on sensory-specific conditions and that ability developed in a sensory-specific condition does not necessarily transfer to another sensory condition.

Keywords:

• Mental rotation
• Touch
• Vision

Acknowledgements

LT and AFC contributed equally to this work. The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹Note that in the present experiment, a single ANOVA with task (visual vs. tactile) and session (1 and 2) as within-subjects variables and condition (switch vs. no-switch) as between-subjects variables was not possible. The two tasks were not performed by all participants. Half of them realised the visual task or the tactile task in both sessions, and the other half realised the visual (or tactile) task in Session 1 and the tactile (or visual) task in Session 2. Moreover, an ANOVA with group (V-V, T-T, V-T, T-V) as between-subjects variable and session as within-subjects variable was not appropriate because it confounds the ordering effect with the effect of modality of the task.