A paper by Dr Alex Provost and Prof Andrews Heathcote from the University of Newcastle was just published in Psychological Review 'online first'. The paper was based on Alex's thesis and describes a quantitative model of mental rotation simultaneously capturing errors and the full distribution of RTs. The model uses Brown and Heathcote’s (2008) model of choice processing to separate the contributions of mental rotation and decision stages, qualitatively linked to neural data published previously. Model selection revealed a stage-based model of mental rotation in accordance with a recent model proposed by Larsen (2014) in which mental rotation takes a variable amount of time with the mean and variance increasing linearly with rotation angle accounted for the data best. Dr Provost will continue to work with Prof Heathcote to apply this model to other datasets and analyses are underway to link the neural data in a more quantitative manner.
Alex Provost recently completed his PhD and is about to formally graduate on October 1. Congratulations Alex for both the paper and graduation!
link to the paper:
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=browsePA.ofp&jcode=rev
