Experimental study demonstrates that shape recognition time increases linearly with angular disparity in human observers, indicating that mental rotation operates as a continuous spatial process.
The time required to recognize that two perspective drawings portray objects of the same three-dimensional shape is found to be (i) a linearly increasing function of the angular difference in the portrayed orientations of the two objects and (ii) no shorter for differences corresponding simply to a rigid rotation of one of the two-dimensional drawings in its own picture plane than for differences corresponding to a rotation of the three-dimensional object in depth.
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Shepard et al. (1971) studied this question.
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