Why does the mental rotation experiment of imagery take reaction time as an index to study the processing of imagery by human brain?

Because the dependent variable indicators of cognitive psychology are usually two: reaction time and reaction accuracy. The reaction time index is based on the assumption that there are addition reaction time and subtraction reaction time, as well as windowing experiments. Generally speaking, cognitive psychology assumes that the information processing process is a sequential knowledge processing, so the opposite time can be used as an external factor to deduce the information processing process.

Let the subjects process a letter, such as R. The subjects need to rotate the letter, and then present the stimulus words to the subjects after a certain time interval, so that the subjects can judge that the stimulus words are the same as the letters processed by the subjects.

Simply put, this experiment assumes that the mental rotation of the subjects is continuous, so when the subjects rotate the representation to any angle, they will be presented with a picture with the same angle as this representation, and the subjects will respond to this stimulus faster.

Extended data:

Psychologists study mental rotation more deeply and carefully. They found that it takes about 1 second for an image of an object to rotate 60 in the mind.

If you hold a book upside down, it takes about 3 seconds to make it undergo a psychological rotation of 180 every word you read. No wonder we find it difficult to read backwards. Of course, when you get used to writing words backwards, you can recognize them directly without mental rotation. At this time, we don't feel very troublesome.