Human-body Analogy Improves Mental Rotation Performance in People Aged 86 to 97 Years

Mental rotation is a spatial ability allowing one to represent and rotate an object in one’s mind, and its performance declines with age. Given previous findings indicating that likening a to-be-rotated object to a human body improves mental rotation performance in young adults, we examined whether this human-body analogy would improve older adults’ mental rotation performance. We also tested whether the human-body analogy effect is age-dependent. In the present study, we analyzed data from 423 community-dwelling older adults (age range: 86–97 years; 219 men and 204 women) who answered two items of a paper-and-pencil mental rotation test: one on abstract cube objects (control condition) and one on cube objects with a human face (embodied condition). The results revealed that more participants correctly answered the item in the embodied condition (32.2%) compared to that in the control condition (19.6%), indicating that the human-body analogy is effective in an oldest-old population (i.e., people aged over 85 years). Notably, we found age differences in human-body analogy effects. While accuracy for mental rotation of abstract objects declined with age, accuracy for embodied objects was preserved with age. These findings suggest that the human-body analogy may prompt older adults to adopt a holistic, rather than a piecemeal, rotation strategy.