Mental Rotation

When psychological studies of mental imagery revived in the late 1960s, arguments centered upon the question of whether mental imagery should be distinguished from language as a separate system of mental representation. Although mental imagery was repeatedly shown to facilitate word retrieval, this did not convince many psychologists that mental imagery and language are different kinds of representation. Mental rotation attracted great attention because it appeared to attest that mental imagery has some spatial and visual properties that are lacking in language. (See Mental Imagery, Philosophical Issues about)