The role of meaning and familiarity in mental transformations

Eighty-four participants mentally rotated meaningful and meaningless objects. Within each type of object, half were simple and half were complex; the complexity was the same across the meaningful and meaningless objects. The patterns of errors were examined as a function of the type of stimuli (meaningful vs. meaningless), complexity, and angle of rotation. The data for the meaningful objects showed steeper slopes of rotation for complex objects than that for simple objects. In contrast, the simple and complex meaningless objects showed comparable increases in error rates as a function of angle of rotation. Furthermore, the slopes remained comparable after pretraining that increased familiarity with the objects. The results are discussed in terms of underlying representations of meaningful and meaningless objects and their implications to mental transformations. The data are consistent with a piecemeal rotation of the meaningful stimuli and a holistic rotation of the meaningless stimuli.