Posture effects on mental transformations of body part images
Poster Presentation

Bettina Forster
City University, London, U.K.

     Abstract ID Number: 162
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: April 18, 2005

Abstract
To investigate the effect of one’s own hand posture on left-right judgments of rotated hand images participants positioned their right and left hand either next to each other (standard posture), crossed so that the left hand was located in right hemispace and vice versa (location displacement), in a fist or oriented towards each other (90º posture). Images of a left and a right hand were presented in six different angular rotations (0º, 60º, 120º, 180º, 240º, 300º). In all conditions reaction times (RT) were fastest to images of an upward pointing hand (0º orientation) and increased monotonically with angular displacement of hand images from the upward pointing hand with the slowest RTs to images of a downward pointing hand (180º orientation). In the standard posture condition and in the location displacement condition RTs were faster to right than to left hand images regardless of their angular rotation. This difference in RT to left and right hand images was reduced when the participants’ own hands were held in a fist, and in the 90 º posture condition, left-right RT differences varied dependent on the rotation of the hand images. It is proposed that mental transformations employed in left-right judgments of body part images are influenced by one’s own posture.