Embodied Mental Rotation – Does It Affect Postural Stability?

Abstract

The effect of different human body part stimuli in mental rotation tasks (MRTs) on postural stability was investigated in two dual-task experiments. There were significant differences within egocentric MRTs (Experiment 1, N = 46): Hand and foot stimuli tended to cause more body sway than whole-body figures and showed increased body sway for higher rotation angles in the MRTs. In object-based MRTs (Experiment 2, N = 109) different stimuli did not evoke different levels of body sway, but higher rotation angles led to higher body sway. Both experiments showed a stabilizing effect of MRTs compared to the control condition. Exploratorily analyses identified reaction time in MRTs as a significant predictor of body sway. The results suggest a heterogeneous impact of mental rotation on postural stability.

Keywords:

• mental rotation
• postural stability
• embodiment
• dual task

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the entire research team, particularly to Franziska Schroter and Markus Siebertz for their advice and helpful discussions regarding statistics. We would also like to extend our thanks to Tsubasa Kawasaki, who provided us with the original stimulus material from the studies on which our hypotheses are mostly based on.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Data Availability Statement

The data that supports the findings of this study is available at https://osf.io/m2u5e/files. The study was preregistered at https://osf.io/mxyn9.