Abstract
Studies have demonstrated that manual and mental rotation show common processes. Training studies have shown that a manual and concurrent visual rotation improves mental rotation performance. In this study, we separated the visual rotation from the manual rotation. In all, 121 participants were randomly assigned to visual training, manual rotation training, or manual training without rotational movement. Before and after the training session of 30 min, they had to solve a chronometric mental rotation test. Data were analysed with linear mixed models and showed an improvement in mental rotation performance for all groups. However, this improvement did not differ between groups. Due to the independence of the form and occurrence of the manual activity, this suggests that it is not the motor activity, but the concurrent visual rotation that leads to improvements in mental rotation tasks. Therefore, the visual component in mental rotation tasks has to be investigated in more detail.
Highlights
Background colour Border colour Face colourCube Diameter Image size File format Centering Base orientations Models Base rotation angles (x, y,z) Angle difference Rotation axes valueTransparent black Grey, white 50px 440px*440px png Optical a, b Peters and Battista (2008), 1–16 –15°,0°,15° 45° y, z
This study clearly provides evidence that the visual rotation whether internal or external is the most important component for improvements in mental rotation tasks
While our results support previous findings of manual training of mental rotation (Adams et al, 2014; Wiedenbauer et al, 2007), the design used here is more comparable to the mental rotation task as it employs a congruency judgement similar to the task used by Wohlschläger and Wohlschläger (1998)
Summary
We estimated the total required number of participants at 192 (64 per training condition) in G*power (Faul et al, 2007) This should yield appropriate power of .8 for medium effect sizes of d = 0.5 at the standard .05 alpha error probability for all pairwise comparisons between groups and for small effect sizes of f = 0.11 for the within-between interaction of groups and their improvements. This should suffice for appropriate power regarding the within subjects effects of mental rotation for the secondary hypothesis S3. Assuming at least 64 participants in the smaller of the two groups in each case, G*power (Faul et al, 2007) shows sufficient power for the analysis
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