Conson, M. , Mazzarella, E. & Trojano, L.
Dept. of Psychology, Second University of Naples, Italy
Developmental studies on mental rotation have focused their attention on childhood or early adolescence, but did not compare different adolescent stages. In the present paper we present a cross-sectional study to clarify the effect of adolescence-related brain maturation processes on different imagery abilities. To this aim, three groups of adolescents with typical development were required to mentally rotate letters, objects and hands. Results showed that 11-12 year-old participants were slower and less accurate than both 14-15 and 17-18 year-old individuals in all the three tasks. Moreover, the effect of body anatomical constraints on mental rotation of hands emerged in 14-15 year-old participants, and fully matured in 17-18 year-old participants. These findings demonstrate that brain developmental changes in the age range between early and middle adolescence are crucial for increasing general efficiency of mental imagery abilities. Visuospatial imagery is fully effective by middle adolescence, whereas only late adolescent automatically activate motor, body-related, information to mentally simulate actions.