Research by Assistant Professor Hiroyuki Muto Won the Excellence Presentation Award at the 85th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association.
Research by Assistant Professor Hiroyuki Muto won the Excellence Presentation Award at the 85th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association (held online from September 1st (Wed) to 8th (Wed), 2021).
The ability to imagine objects rotating in the mind (mental rotation) is a type of intelligence called spatial thinking. It is known that mental rotation works more efficiently when envisaging the object to be rotated as a human figure. This study revealed that both passive and active processes are involved in this efficiency improvement: the former is evoked by the visual information from an object likened to a human body, and the latter is provoked by the knowledge that an object can be envisaged as a human figure. The findings suggest that it would be possible to reduce the difficulty of spatial thinking through informational interventions or effective design.
[Presentation Title]
Two routes of the human-body analogy effect in mental rotation: Preregistered online experiments
[Presenter]
Hiroyuki Muto
[Presentation Awards Page]
https://psych.or.jp/prize/conf/
(Information about the selection process and critiques is also available on the website.)
2022/02/02