A comparative study on manipulations of body, object, and space images by human and nonhuman primates.

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So far, enormous number of studies have observed mental rotation phenomenon by humans, however almost all studies by non-human animals have failed to observe animals' mental rotation, that is regarded as a reflection of mental image manipulation. The present study assessed mental rotation phenomena by Japanese monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans. We hypothesized that non-primates might have performed symbolic matching-to-sample in the previous mental rotation studies. Then, we trained various angles of canonical letters as S+ as opposed to those of mirror letters (or vice versa) before the mental rotation task of matching-to-sample. As the results, the monkeys showed a linear increase of reaction times as function of rotated angles of a sample stimulus. We have also obtained substantial data with human subject from mental rotation experiments of body image and by means of EEG.