Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We find evidence for a tight coupling between motor action and transfomation of visual mental images: in a dual-task experiment involving both mental and manual rotation, it is found that mental rotation of abstract visual images is faster and less error-prone when accompanied by manual rotation in the same direction, slower and more error-prone when motor rotation is in the opposite direction. Variations in motor speed, on both large and small scales, are accompanied by corresponding variations, in the same direction, in mental rotation speed. We briefly speculate on the mechanisms that could give rise to this interaction.