Cheng You, Hegarty Mary, Chrastil Elizabeth R
University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2020 Jun 3;5(1):25. doi: 10.1186/s41235-020-00230-9.
This study investigated the impact of handedness on a common spatial abilities task, the mental rotation task (MRT). The influence of a right-handed world was contrasted with people's embodied experience with their own hands by testing both left- and right-handed people on an MRT of right- and left-hand stimuli. An additional consideration is the influence of matching the shape of the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one's own hands. Two orthogonal hypothesis axes were crossed to yield four competing hypotheses. One axis contrasted (i) embodied experience versus (ii) world knowledge; the other axis contrasted (a) the match between the visual image of a hand on the screen and one's own hand versus (b) the resemblance of the shape outline information from the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one's own hands.
Among people with mixed handedness, right-handers performed more accurately for left-hand stimuli, while left-handers had a trend for higher accuracy for right-hand stimuli. For people with extreme handedness, right-handers outperformed left-handers. Regardless of group, there was no significant variation in performance for left-hand stimuli, with only right-hand stimuli producing significant variation.
No hypothesis fully aligned with all the data. For left-hand stimuli, the consistent performance across groups does not provide support for embodied experience, while world knowledge might influence all groups similarly. Alternatively, the within-group variation for mixed-handed people supports embodied experience in the hand MRT, likely processed through visual-proprioceptive integration.
本研究调查了利手对一项常见空间能力任务——心理旋转任务（MRT）的影响。通过对左利手和右利手人群进行右手和左手刺激的MRT测试，将右手主导的世界的影响与人们对自己双手的身体体验进行了对比。另一个需要考虑的因素是手刺激的形状与自身手部本体感觉的匹配度。两条相互正交的假设轴交叉产生了四个相互竞争的假设。一条轴对比了（i）身体体验与（ii）世界知识；另一条轴对比了（a）屏幕上手的视觉图像与自己手的匹配度，以及（b）手刺激的形状轮廓信息与自身手部本体感觉的相似度。
在混合利手人群中，右利手者对左手刺激的表现更准确，而左利手者对右手刺激的准确性有更高的趋势。对于极端利手人群，右利手者的表现优于左利手者。无论组别如何，左手刺激的表现没有显著差异，只有右手刺激产生了显著差异。
没有一个假设能完全与所有数据相符。对于左手刺激，各组之间一致的表现不支持身体体验，而世界知识可能对所有组有类似的影响。或者，混合利手人群组内的差异支持了手部MRT中的身体体验，可能是通过视觉-本体感觉整合来处理的。
