The Difference between Flipping Strategy and Spinning Strategy in Mental Rotation

Murray (1997 Memory & Cognition 25 96–105) showed that, when an inverted object was mentally rotated to upright, the reaction time (RT) of flipping strategy (rotating in depth about the horizontal axis) was shorter than that of spinning strategy (rotating in the picture plane). We hypothesised the absence of representation at the intermediate position between the inverted and the upright representations in the flipping strategy, and investigated this hypothesis by a priming paradigm that included prime and probe tasks within one trial. In the prime task, participants were asked to mentally rotate an inverted object to upright. In the probe task, they were asked to judge whether two objects simultaneously presented were the same or different. The flipping strategy in the prime task did not prime the probe task, whereas the spinning strategy did. The present results suggest that there is no intermediate representation in the flipping strategy: the difference in RT between the flipping strategy and the spinning strategy may be attributed to whether there is an intermediate representation or not, which could explain why depth rotation is faster.