Mental Rotation and the Automatic Updating of Body-Centered Spatial Relationships

Blindfolded adult participants (7 male and 9 female) were asked to point to previously seen targets after a body rotation. In 1 condition, participants had to update their positions relative to the targets during rotation; in another condition, they had to ignore the rotation and to imagine that they were still in their initial orientation. In the updating condition, replicating research of J. J. Rieser (1989), response latencies were only slightly affected by the magnitude of the body rotation. In the ignoring condition, however, response latencies increased with the angular difference between the participants' new position and their original orientation, suggesting that the participants updated their positions and then retrospectively "undid" this updating to mentally reestablish their original orientation. The results are supportive of the idea that heading is updated automatically as a person moves so that she or he is always primarily oriented with respect to her or his actual position.