Individual strategies in a spatial task and how they relate to aptitudes

Abstract

Thirty-two subjects were first submitted to a series of aptitude tests, then participated in a mental rotation task with advance information (Cooper, 1975), and finally gave retrospective reports about their solution strategy. The verbal reports showed that different subjects used different strategies to perform the rotation task, and also that some subjects shifted strategies, in that they successively adopted several ways of processing the same task. The coding of verbal reports led to distinguish five types of strategies (called rotation, partial rotation, verbal, projection, multiple). Five groups of subjects using preferentially one of these strategies were constituted. For each group hypotheses on performance were tested via analyses on reaction times and errors. These analyses confirmed that the five strategy groups produced different patterns of RT in conformity with verbal reports. Moreover the comparison of the mental aptitude profiles across the different strategy groups suggests that strategy choices are affected by steady and general characteristics of cognitive functioning.