Eye Movements In Recognition Of Rotated Pictures

Mental rotation is one of important activity in human. Many researchers studied this problem from different points, however, researchers don't reach an agreement about the essence of mental rotation. We studied this topic about processing of rotated scene, which may make us to understand the topic more deeply.Our study used two factors within-subjects repeated-measure design to examine the eye movement of viewing different rotated scene, taking advantage of eye movement technique. There are two factors: one is degree of rotation, which has 8 levels: 0°, 45°, 90°, 135°, 180°, 225°, 270°, 315°; another is changes of scene, which has 2 levels: changed scene, no-changed scene. The result showed: the time of scene identification changed with different angle of rotation, and when the scene rotated 180°, the RT is the largest. During the processing, the total fixation time and the number of saccade etc had also analog mental rotation effect, that was equal with the RT. Subjects need to cost more fixation time and more number of saccade to identify object, when the scene was rotated from 0° to 180°. Otherwise, the eye movement results also indicated, the information needed to recognize object deletions is acquired from a relatively restricted area of a scene, when deleted object in the scene. The phenomenon may reflect visuo-spatial working memory had some restrict in space-location memory.