Discrimination of Mirror-Images: Choice Time Analysis of Human Adult Performance

Abstract

For members of many species left-right mirror-image discriminations are more difficult than are up-down mirror-image discriminations. A previous study with children using simultaneous presentation of pairs of figures showed that the relative difficulty of such discriminations depended upon the way in which the figures were aligned. The present experiment with human adults uses choice times to measure the difficulty of the two kinds of mirror-image discriminations under two alignment conditions. While the relative difficulties are clearly affected by alignment, the experiment shows that overall, left-right discriminations are still the more difficult.