Strong biomechanical constraints on young children’s mental imagery of hands

Abstract

Mental rotation (MR) of body parts is a useful paradigm to investigate how people manipulate mental imagery related to body schema. It has been documented that adult participants use ‘motor imagery’ for MR of hands: a behavioural indication is a biomechanical effect, that is, hand pictures in orientations to which imitative hand movement would be biomechanically difficult require longer response times to be visually identified as the left or right hand.