Mental Rotation of Bodily Shapes and Shepard-Metzler Cubes

Mental rotation is defined as the process of imagining an object rotated into a different orientation in space. In their classic study, Shepard & Metzler (1971) presented their participants with two visual stimuli (block shapes) and later asked if they were the same or mirror images of each other. Sayeki (1981) added a human head to Shepard-Metzler cubes and showed that these figures increased mental rotation speed and reduced error rates. Amorim, Isableu and Jarraya (2006) manipulated the visual similarity between Shepard-Metzler cubes and human figure in a series of experiments and showed that shape matching of human postures had a cognitive advantage. In the current study, a novel version of the mental rotation task was developed. Different configurations of a human-like body were rotated, and these rotations were depicted either with Shepard-Metzler cubes or a human-like doll. Results are discussed in relation to advantages of embodiment in performance.