Neural Basis of Spatial Ability and Anatomical Concepts: An fMRI pilot study

Abstract

First‐time anatomy students struggle with organizing massive amounts of material, as well as demonstrating the necessary spatial ability skills to be successful. Instruction of undergraduate students can be quite challenging due to students' lack of metacognition and unfamiliarity with anatomical concepts. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can bypass this lack of metacognition and examine students' neural organization of anatomical knowledge and their neural basis of spatial ability. In this project, a group of undergraduate anatomy students (n= 53) completed a series of cognitive tasks. A simple linear regression was then performed to predict final course grade based on students' scores on cognitive tasks as well as examine the similarities between common cognitive tasks. Gender was not a predictor of mental rotation score (F(1, 51)= 3.230, p = .078), with an R2 of .06. A second cohort of undergraduate students (n=2) and graduate students (n=2) completed a Shepard‐Metzler (1971) Mental Rotation task and an anatomical concepts task under fMRI. The undergraduate and graduate cohorts' cortical activation during the tasks was compared using statistical parametric mapping (SPM). This work demonstrates the importance of spatial ability in the undergraduate anatomy setting and builds a neural foundation for understanding how anatomy learners organize anatomical concepts. This works also illustrates how the collaboration of educational researchers, cognitive scientists, imaging specialists and anatomical educators can provide diverse techniques and data for the betterment of anatomical and medical education.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.