This project, PSA 002 of the Psychological Science Accelerator, examined whether people mentally simulate the orientation of objects while reading sentences that describe them, extending decades of research on mental simulation in language comprehension. Earlier work using the sentence-picture verification task had found robust match advantages for shape, color, and size, but evidence for orientation was limited and confined mostly to Western samples. The study combined a large cross-linguistic replication with a mental rotation task to relate individual differences in mental imagery to the strength of the orientation effect.
Sau-Chin Chen proposed and led this project as a large-scale, multi-laboratory collaboration coordinated through the Psychological Science Accelerator network, bringing together dozens of contributing labs and languages. The resulting registered report, covering 18 languages and nearly 4,000 participants, was published as Investigating object orientation effects across 18 languages in Current Psychology (2025).
By testing the same paradigm across speakers of many different languages, the project offered one of the most direct tests to date of whether object-orientation simulation generalizes beyond the languages in which it was first documented, and it produced a well-powered dataset connecting the phenomenon to individual differences in mental imagery ability.
Status: Stable — completed and archived on OSF.
Sau-Chin Chen
Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology
My research interests include cognitive psychology, open science, and reproducible research.