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

迄今为止，大量的研究都观察到了人类的心理旋转现象，但几乎所有的非人类动物研究都没有观察到动物的心理旋转，这被认为是心理图像操纵的一种反映。本研究评估了日本猴子、黑猩猩和人类的心理旋转现象。我们假设非灵长类动物可能在之前的心理旋转研究中进行了符号匹配。然后，在匹配样本的心理旋转任务之前，我们将标准字母的各种角度训练为S+，而不是镜像字母（反之亦然）。结果显示，猴子的反应时间随着样本刺激的旋转角度呈线性增长。我们还从人体图像的心理旋转实验和脑电图的方法中获得了大量的人体被试数据。

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.