Reliabilities of mental rotation tasks: limits to the assessment of individual differences

Abstract

Mental rotation tasks with objects and body parts as targets are widely used in cognitive neuropsychology. Even though these tasks are well established to study between-groups differences, the reliability on an individual level is largely unknown. We present a systematic study on the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of individual differences in mental rotation tasks comparing different target types and orders of presentations. In total n = 99 participants (n = 63 for the retest) completed the mental rotation tasks with hands, feet, faces, and cars as targets. Different target types were presented in either randomly mixed blocks or blocks of homogeneous targets. Across all target types, the consistency (split-half reliability) and stability (test-retest reliabilities) were good or acceptable both for intercepts and slopes. At the level of individual targets, only intercepts showed acceptable reliabilities. Blocked presentations resulted in significantly faster and numerically more consistent and stable responses. Mental rotation tasks-especially in blocked variants-can be used to reliably assess individual differences in global processing speed. However, the assessment of the theoretically important slope parameter for individual targets requires further adaptations to mental rotation tests.

Figure 1

Experimental design. (a) Stimuli used in the experiment (left version of stimuli). (b) Angles of rotation (right hand as an example). (c) Trial timing.

Figure 2

Mean response times in the different conditions (90 deg. medial and lateral rotations were combined). Error bars represent 95% CI. Solid (blocked variant) and broken (mixed variant) lines represent linear fit.