Mental rotation
Their research showed that the reaction time for participants to decide if the pair of items matched or not was linearly proportional to the angle of rotation from the original position.
This increased brain activation is accompanied by longer times to complete the rotation task and higher error rates.
[17] The authors concluded that an ability to mentally rotate objects can be detected in infants as young as 3 months of age.
Additional variables that appeared to influence infants' MR performance include motor activity, stimulus complexity, hormone levels, and parental attitudes[18] Physical objects that people imagine rotating in everyday life have many properties, such as textures, shapes, and colors.
A study at the University of California Santa Barbara was conducted to specifically test the extent to which visual information, such as color, is represented during mental rotation.
In particular, orchestral musicians' MRT task performance exhibited aptitude levels significantly higher than the population baseline.
This experiment brought to the research that if people could find ways to train their mental rotation skills they could perform better in high context activities with greater ease.
Results suggested that athletes were better at performing mental rotation tasks that were more closely related to their sport of expertise.
These findings make sense intuitively, given that architecture students are highly acquainted with manipulating the orientation of structures in space.
Following the Vandenberg and Kuse study, subsequent research attempted to assess the presence of gendered differences in mental rotation ability.
However, Voyer et al. conducted a comprehensive review in 1995, which showed that gender differences were reliable and more pronounced in specific tasks, indicating that sex affects the processes underlying performance in spatial memory tests.
Analogous to other types of spatial reasoning tasks, men tended to outperform women by a statistically significant margin[16] among the MR literature.
In 2012, a study[26] was done in which males and females were asked to execute a mental rotation task, and their brain activity was recorded with an fMRI.
Men assumed the role of hunting and foraging, which necessitates a greater degree of visual-spatial processing than the child-rearing and domestic tasks which women performed.
[27] Additionally, the significant role of hormonal variation between the sexes was supported by a 2004 study, which revealed that testosterone (a principal androgen) level in young men was negatively correlated with the number of errors and response time in the MRT.
[30] Along the same lines, a 2021 study found intriguing results in an attempt to discern the mechanisms behind the established gender disparity.
The researchers hypothesized that task characteristics, not only anatomical or social differences, could explain men's advantage in mental rotation.
This finding may explain underlying causes behind the usual disparate outcomes, in that the male ability to do somewhat better on MRT tests probably stems from the evolutionary applicability of spatial reasoning.
[31] Likewise, other recent studies suggest that difference between Mental rotation cognition task are a consequence of procedure and artificiality of the stimuli.
Results show that changing the stimuli can eliminate any male advantages found from the Vandenberg and Kuse test (1978).
They conclude their study by "autistic people do not have an extreme version of a male cognitive profile as proposed by the EMB theory".
[33] Much of the current and future research directions pertain to expanding on what has been established by the literature and investigating underlying causes behind previous results.
Future studies will consider additional factors that could influence MR ability, including demographics, various aptitudes, personality, rare/deviant psychological profiles, among others.
Many current and future studies are and will be examining the ways that certain brain abnormalities, including many of those caused by traumatic injuries, affect one's ability to perform mental rotation.
Researchers found children who trained with mental rotation tasks had improved strategy skills after practicing.
[36] People use many different strategies to complete tasks; psychologists will study participants who use specific cognitive skills to compare competency and reaction times.
[38] Participants' identification with the object could hinder or help their mental rotation abilities across gender and ages to support the earlier claim that males have faster reaction times.
