Abstract
Mental rotation ability is associated with successful advances in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and occupations. Meta-analyses have shown consistent sex disparities in mental rotation, where men outperform women on one measure of mental rotation ability, the Mental Rotations Test (MRT). Spatial anxiety, or the fear and apprehension felt when completing a task that requires spatial thinking, was proposed as a mechanism explaining the relation between sex and mental rotation test performance. This study modified the Spatial Anxiety Scale (SAS) to include questions about how anxious individuals feel when they must mentally rotate items to accomplish a task (e.g., playing Tetris). An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to assess the factorial structure of the modified spatial anxiety scale. Three factor loadings were extracted representing the ability to navigate, mentally rotate objects, and visualize objects. Furthermore, we analyzed the role of spatial anxiety and trait anxiety as potential mediators of the relation between participant sex and mental rotation performance. Spatial anxiety partially mediated the link between the sex of the participants and the MRT performance controlling for trait anxiety. Only navigation and mental rotation anxiety significantly mediated the relation between participant sex and mental rotation performance. We posit spatial anxiety as a barrier to efficient and accurate spatial thinking, and suggest that reducing spatial anxiety has the potential to improve spatial skills and reduce sex differences in mental rotation test performance. To ascertain this, an experimental design can determine whether a reduction in spatial anxiety causes changes in mental rotation test scores.
Highlights
Spatial thinking consists of the conceptualization and manipulation of information about 2D and 3D objects in the world such as deriving information about shapes, object-to-object relations, frames of reference, and location (Newcombe & Shipley, 2015)
The aims of the current study were three-fold: (1) to create a Modified Spatial Anxiety Scale (M-SAS) with items that correspond to both navigation and mental rotation and explore the factor structure of the MSAS, (2) to examine whether sex differences in Mental Rotations Test (MRT) performance are mediated by individual differences in spatial anxiety, and (3) to distinguish whether spatial anxiety, as a comprehensive construct or a specific subfactor of spatial anxiety, mediates the sex difference in performance on the MRT
The aims of the current study were to (1) develop a Modified Spatial Anxiety Scale (M-SAS) that included items that corresponded to navigation and mental rotation to explore the factor structure of this newly developed scale, (2) to investigate whether reported sex differences in mental rotation are mediated by individual differences in spatial anxiety using this newly developed M-SAS, and (3) to examine whether specific factors identified using the exploratory factor analysis mediate sex differences in mental rotation
Summary
Spatial thinking consists of the conceptualization and manipulation of information about 2D and 3D objects in the world such as deriving information about shapes, object-to-object relations, frames of reference, and location (Newcombe & Shipley, 2015). Numerous daily activities, such as packing a suitcase, rearranging furniture, finding your car in a parking garage, and drawing a graph, require spatial thinking. Spatial tests are used to predict performance (Lohman, 1996) in professions including engineering, physical sciences, geosciences, and geography Professionals in these fields have higher self-ratings of their spatial skills, including mental rotation and navigation skill, compared to those in other professions (Hegarty et al, 2010). Spatial ability is strongly associated with entry into and success in the STEM fields (Humphreys et al, 1993; Shea et al, 2001; Wai et al, 2009) and is a promising skill to encourage through education
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