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Men­tal rota­tion refers to mov­ing things around in your mind. It is one of the main visu­ospa­tial skills we all have…in dif­fer­ent degrees, yes.

Here’s an exam­ple. Please pic­ture in your mind an arrow point­ing to the right. Now, turn this arrow so it points to the left. Done? You have just per­formed a men­tal rota­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

What is men­tal self-rota­tion?

It is the cog­ni­tive skill to imag­ine your­self in dif­fer­ent loca­tions in space and to imag­ine your­self mov­ing accord­ing­ly. We need that skill in every­day activ­i­ties such as read­ing a map or find­ing our car in the park­ing lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Men­tal self-rota­tion is the cog­ni­tive abil­i­ty to imag­ine your­self in dif­fer­ent loca­tions in space, and to imag­ine your body mov­ing in space. We need it for every­day activ­i­ties such as find­ing a place or read­ing a map. The abil­i­ty involved is tech­ni­cal­ly called ego­cen­tric spa­tial trans­for­ma­tions (yes, that is the sci­en­tif­ic expres­sion) or men­tal self rota­tion, and the brain areas pri­mar­i­ly involved are the pari­etal lobes.

Here’s an exam­ple.

— Fig­ures above: Read the rest of this entry »

Visu­ospa­tial skills are used every­day in many ways, rang­ing from going from one room to anoth­er in your house to nav­i­gat­ing in a new city.

Let’s take an exam­ple. Can you pic­ture in your mind an arrow point­ing to the right? Now, turn this arrow so it points to the left. Done? Read the rest of this entry »

Draw the let­ter J on your men­tal sketch­pad. Now draw the let­ter D. Turn it 90 degrees to the left and put it in top of the J. What does this shape resem­ble?

An umbrel­la, of course! You’ve just used your work­ing mem­o­ry. Our work­ing mem­o­ry is a cru­cial part of the mem­o­ry sys­tem, not least because it helps us to fig­ure things out men­tal­ly.

Tem­po­rary work­space
Not only can we store infor­ma­tion in our short-term mem­o­ry, but we can also manip­u­late it. This is why short-term mem­o­ry is some­times also called work­ing mem­o­ry. Work­ing mem­o­ry is our tem­po­rary work­space. We use it in every­day tasks rang­ing from dri­ving (where you need to keep in mind the loca­tion of the cars around you as you nav­i­gate through traf­fic), to prepar­ing a bud­get (where you need to keep in mind one spend­ing cat­e­go­ry while work­ing on anoth­er), to writ­ing a let­ter (where you need to keep in mind all you want to say while devel­op­ing each point a sen­tence at a time). Read the rest of this entry »