Asakura Nobuhiko, Inui Toshio
Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Hommachi, Sakyo-Ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan; e-mail:
Iperception. 2011;2(5):477-85. doi: 10.1068/i0425. Epub 2011 Aug 15.
Previous research has shown that our ability to imagine object rotations is limited and associated with spatial reference frames; performance is poor unless the axis of rotation is aligned with the object-intrinsic frame or with the environmental frame. Here, we report an active effect of these reference frames on the process of mental rotation: they can disambiguate object rotations when the axis of rotation is ambiguous. Using novel mental rotation stimuli, in which the rotational axes between pairs of objects can be defined with respect to multiple frames of reference, we demonstrate that the vertical axis is preferentially used for imagined object rotations over the object-intrinsic axis for an efficient minimum rotation. In contrast, the object-intrinsic axis can play a decisive role when the vertical axis is absent as a way of resolving the ambiguity of rotational motion. When interpreted in conjunction with recent advances in the Bayesian framework for motion perception, our results suggest that these spatial frames of reference are incorporated into an internal model of object rotations, thereby shaping our ability to imagine the transformation of an object's spatial structure.
先前的研究表明，我们想象物体旋转的能力是有限的，且与空间参照系相关；除非旋转轴与物体固有参照系或环境参照系对齐，否则表现会很差。在此，我们报告了这些参照系对心理旋转过程的积极影响：当旋转轴不明确时，它们可以消除物体旋转的歧义。使用新颖的心理旋转刺激，其中物体对之间的旋转轴可以相对于多个参照系来定义，我们证明，为了实现高效的最小旋转，垂直轴比物体固有轴更优先用于想象物体旋转。相比之下，当垂直轴不存在时，物体固有轴可以作为解决旋转运动歧义的一种方式发挥决定性作用。结合运动感知的贝叶斯框架的最新进展来解释时，我们的结果表明，这些空间参照系被纳入物体旋转的内部模型，从而塑造了我们想象物体空间结构变换的能力。
