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The brain’s flip styleWithout looking, which way does Abraham Lincoln face on a penny? Most people have a hard time remembering which way he’s oriented. Some researchers think that’s because when mentally representing an object, people tend to account for an object’s shape rather than its orientation in space, says Emma Gregory, a cognitive science graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. Gregory studies visual-spatial cognition in adults, and recently designed a study to find out if people’s memory errors support the object-centered hypothesis.
She showed students a series of objects, such as a toothbrush and a flashlight, oriented at some angle and then asked them to draw those objects after they were presented. Gregory found that participants tended to rotate the object around its own axis. For example, if students were shown a toothbrush at a 45-degree angle with the bristles pointing up and to the left, the most common error would be to draw that toothbrush at the same 45-degree angle, but to put the bristles facing down and to the right. Gregory got the same results whether she told the students to pay special attention to the object’s orientation or not and whether they matched the objects multiple-choice-style instead of drawing. This consistent error pattern suggests that when people mentally represent an object, they account for its orientation within its own reference frame—in other words, the toothbrush’s head in relation to its handle—but that alone isn’t enough for people to accurately determine its orientation in space. Participants made these kinds of errors about 30 percent to 40 percent of the time. Next, Gregory will conduct a related study on how people initially choose and subsequently adjust their grip size when reaching for an object, an experiment she hopes will shed further light on questions of spatial orientation. “These are very simple things that we take for granted, but we don’t really know how the brain processes that information,” says Gregory. Related article…
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© 2008 American Psychological Association |
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