Role of manually-generated visual cues in crawling and non-crawling 9-month-old infants’ mental rotation

Abstract This study investigated the role of manually self-generated visual cues on crawling and non-crawling 9-month-old infants’ mental rotation. Forty-three infants were tested using a simplified Shepard-Metzler task to measure mental rotation performance. Prior to the mental rotation task, infants were given the opportunity to manually rotate either a vertically- or a horizontally-striped cylinder around the same vertical movement axis as the mental rotation objects (see Antrilli & Wang, 2016 ). Results revealed that while there were no signs of mental rotation in non-crawlers, crawlers in the vertical-stripe condition showed a novelty preference, whereas crawlers in the horizontal-stripe condition preferred to look at the familiar test object during the mental rotation task. This suggests that crawling is associated with a more differentiated processing of self-generated rotation-specific visual cues than non-crawling.