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Effects of Stimulus Views on Mental Rotation of Hands: An Event-Related Potential Study

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Foundations and Practical Applications of Cognitive Systems and Information Processing

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 215))

Abstract

Mental rotation of hands, which is subject to biomechanical constrains, involves participants engaging in motor imagery processing. To contribute to a better understanding of the process of hand mental rotation, reaction times and event-related potential were measured while participants were performing a left–right hand recognition task. Participants apparently solved the task by imagining their own hands rotating to the orientation of the stimulus for comparison. In line with previous studies, the behavioral results showed that slower reaction times were found for the hand views that could not be easily reached with real movement. More importantly, the event-related potential results revealed that the amplitude of rotation-related negativity (RRN) decreased with the difficulty of the hand views increasing. The previous results are complemented by this study; it is stimulus views that modulate reaction times and the amplitude of RRN during mental rotation task of hands.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2011CB933204), National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 90820304, 91120007, 61105123, Chinese 863 Project: 2012AA011601.

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Correspondence to Xiaorong Gao .

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Chen, X., Bin, G., Gao, X. (2014). Effects of Stimulus Views on Mental Rotation of Hands: An Event-Related Potential Study. In: Sun, F., Hu, D., Liu, H. (eds) Foundations and Practical Applications of Cognitive Systems and Information Processing. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 215. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37835-5_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37835-5_1

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