Priming Effect Based On Mental Rotation Processing

Priming effect has many components. However, those components which have revealed in previous studies rely on stimulus. We proposed that there is a kind of priming effect relied on mental rotation, which is independent of stimulus. We showed in Experiment 1 that the rate of mental rotation was faster when the rotation direction was repeated, despite changing the object to be rotated. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect preserved even characters used in any two consecutive trials facing different sides. In Experiment 3, we found similar effects with up-arrows inserted between trials, and therefore, excluded the possibility that the internal reference frame adjustment was an alternative explanation for this effect. In Experiment 4a and Experiment 4b, we denied orientation similarity between successive stimuli to be the source of the effect. In all experiment above, participants were asked to response only to normal stimulus. In Experiment 5, we found Stroop-like effect related to the face direction of stimulus and response selection, when participants were asked to response to every stimulus with a left or right key. In Experiment 6, we found that the rate of mental rotation was not influenced by grey level of stimulus, which separated it from the perceptual processing. These results provide evidence that the rotation direction repetition benefit was based on mental rotation.