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Yanick Courbois
The present study was designed to investigate the effects of the geometrical properties of an object on children's abilities to mentally rotate unfamiliar figures. We report two experiments in which children aged 7, 9 and 11 years were submitted to mental rotation tasks of unfamiliar stimuli. Three unfamiliar shapes composed of four arms were used. For each shape, there was a version with a salient axis (S+) and a version with no salient axis (S�) . In experiment one, the reference stimulus always pointed to 0° and the angular disparity with the other stimulus was 0°, 60°, 120" and 180°. In experiment two, the procedure was the same as in experiment 1 except that the reference stimulus could point either to 0° or to 60°. Results of experiment one were congruent with those of Courbois (2000) and suggested that the ability to rotate mentally unfamiliar figures with no salient axis improves with age. Results of experiment two suggested that young children had great difficulty performing the mental rotation task when none of the stimuli was aligned with the vertical direction.
