Comparing viewer and array mental rotations in different planes

Participants imagined rotating either themselves or an array of objects tha t surrounded them. Their task was to report on the egocentric position of a n item in the array following the imagined rotation. The dependent measures were response latency and number of errors committed. Past research has sh own that self-rotation is easier than array rotation. However, we found tha t imagined egocentric rotations were as difficult to imagine as rotations o f the environment when people performed imagined rotations in the midsagitt al or coronal plane. The advantages of imagined self-rotations are specific to mental rotations performed in the transverse plane.