Image rotation of misoriented letter strings: Effects of orientation cuing and repetition

Abstract

Three experiments were designed to investigate whether the characteristic function relating response time to stimulus orientation reflects the observer imagining the rotation of the stimulus to upright (the "image rotation" hypothesis) or rotation of an internal reference frame in response to the misoriented stimulus (the "frame rotation" hypothesis). Identification times in response to misoriented words were measured in Experiment 1, whereas in Experiments 2 and 3, lexical decision times in response to misoriented letter strings were measured. Trials occurred in blocks; words within a block were presented at the same orientation. It was argued that this mode of presentation would facilitate the use of a frame rotation strategy by allowing for a gradual readjustment of an internal reference frame. The characteristic "mental rotation" function was observed in all three experiments. However, the data indicated that observers continued to imagine the rotation of the word to upright in each trial; there was no evidence of readjustment of an internal reference frame. An additional finding of interest occurred in Experiment 1, in which observers identified the same set of misoriented words across two sessions. The identification times were faster, and the slope of the mental rotation function was lower, in the second session. These results are discussed as in relation to the image rotation hypothesis of mental rotation and to "instance-based skill acquisition" (Masson, 1986) in word recognition.In the present paper, we examine an issue raised by Koriat and Norman (1984) in the title of their paper" What is rotated in mental rotation?" As an example of research that is usually interpreted as indicating' 'mental rotation," Cooper and Shepard (1973) reported that the time to decide whether an alphanumeric character was in its normal or mirror-image version increased monotonically as the angular deviation from upright increased to 180 0 • Furthermore, this monotonic increase persisted when observers were cued to stimulus orientation prior to each trial. Cooper and Shepard proposed that subjects mentally rotated some internal representation of the alphanumeric to its normal, upright position prior to making a decision about the version of the stimulus. This "normalization" process has been interpreted as supportive of a general class of template models of form perception which Preparation of this report was supported by NASA Cooperative Agreement NCC 2-327 to San Jose State University, Kevin Jordan, Project Director. We would like to thank Pierre Jolicoeur, Asher Koriat, Lester Krueger, and Roger Shepard for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. In particular, Pierre Jolicoeur and Asher Koriat suggested the random presentation conditions used in Experiments 2 and 3. Additional thanks go to Susanne Delzell, Kimberly Jobe, Fidel Lam, and Beverly Sanford for their assistance with data collection, John Empey for his technical assistance, and especially Guy Woffindin for programming Experiments 2 and 3. ...

Testing the direct-access model: GOD does not prime DOG

“…Researchers who have examined lexical access under conditions of stimulus degradation have done so through various alterations of the stimulus. Typical degradation techniques include pattern masking (Scarborough et aI., 1977), brief-exposure pattern masking (Van Orden, 1987), progressive demasking (Grainger & Segui, 1990), progressive degfragmentation (Snodgrass & Mintzer, 1993), and spatial misorientation (Howard, 1991;Jordan & Huntsman, 1990Kolers, 1968;Koriat & Norman, 1984, 1989Masson, 1986;Navon, 1978).…”

“…Misorientation has been found to be detrimental to the processing times of text (Kolers, 1968;Masson, 1986) as well as individual words (Jordan & Huntsman, 1990Koriat & Norman, 1985, 1989Navon, 1978). Furthermore, misorientation ticipant's data were eliminated from all analyses.…”

The effects of context on learning to identify plane-misoriented views of familiar objects

“…Furthermore, this misorientation disadvantage is reduced but not eliminated by repeatedly presenting a given picture of an object (see Jolicoeur, 1990;Lawson, 1999 for reviews). Similarly, misoriented words are initially harder to identify than upright views, but this disadvantage reduces with practice (Jordan & Huntsman, 1990, 1995. This reduction in the misorientation disadvantage does not occur for new stimuli presented after practice at the task with other stimuli.…”

On the process of recognizing inverted words: Does it rely only on orientation-invariant cues?

“…Most people 2 read upside-down words much better than they read words transformed in any other way (e.g., reflection or inversion of individual letters; Kolers, 1968), although the cost is substantial in that case as well (also see, e.g., Cohen & Squire, 1980;Driver & Baylis, 1995;Kolers & Perkins, 1969a, 1969bKoriat & Norman, 1984, 1985Masson, 1986;Navon, 1978). Furthermore, in some conditions words seem to be identified somewhat faster when presented in the 180º orientation than in 240º or 120º orientations (see, e.g., Jordan & Huntsman, 1990;Koriat & Norman, 1985). It is not clear whether these effects are due to practice or to some inherent advantage in processing.…”