Perspective‐taking vs. mental rotation transformations and how they predict spatial navigation performance

Abstract In Experiment 1, participants completed one of two versions of a computerized pointing direction task that used the same stimuli but different spatial transformation instructions. In the perspective‐taking version, participants were to imagine standing at one location facing a second location and then to imagine pointing to a third location. In the array‐rotation version, participants saw a vector pointing to one location, were to imagine the second vector with the same base as the first pointing to a second location, to mentally rotate the two vectors, and finally to indicate the direction of the imagined vector after the rotation. In Experiment 2, participants completed the perspective‐taking, mental rotation, and four large‐scale navigational tasks. The results showed that the perspective‐taking task required unique spatial transformation ability from the array rotation task, and the perspective‐taking task predicted unique variance over the mental rotation task in navigational tasks that required updating self‐to‐object representations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.