Strengthening spatial reasoning: elucidating the attentional and neural mechanisms associated with mental rotation skill development

Katherine C Moen,Alex S Cohen,Steven G Greening,Tovah M Cowan,Leslie G Butler,Jagannathan Ramanujam,Stephanie M Saltzmann,Melissa R Beck,Lauryn M Burleigh

doi:10.1186/s41235-020-00211-y

Abstract

Spatial reasoning is a critical skill in many everyday tasks and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The current study examined how training on mental rotation (a spatial reasoning task) impacts the completeness of an encoded representation and the ability to rotate the representation. We used a multisession, multimethod design with an active control group to determine how mental rotation ability impacts performance for a trained stimulus category and an untrained stimulus category. Participants in the experimental group (n = 18) showed greater improvement than the active control group (n = 18) on the mental rotation tasks. The number of saccades between objects decreased and saccade amplitude increased after training, suggesting that participants in the experimental group encoded more of the object and possibly had more complete mental representations after training. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data revealed distinct neural activation associated with mental rotation, notably in the right motor cortex and right lateral occipital cortex. These brain areas are often associated with rotation and encoding complete representations, respectively. Furthermore, logistic regression revealed that activation in these brain regions during the post-training scan significantly predicted training group assignment. Overall, the current study suggests that effective mental rotation training protocols should aim to improve the encoding and manipulation of mental representations.

Highlights

IntroductionMental rotation is a spatial reasoning task that is pervasive in everyday activities (e.g., driving, reading maps, filling the dishwasher, building Lego sets), and mental rotation performance is predictive of creativity, general intelligence, success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009), and success in several professions, including chemistry (Bodner & Guay, 1997; Harle & Towns, 2011), engineering (Samsudin, Rafi, & Hanif, 2011; Sorby, 2009), surgery (Stransky, Wilcox, & Dubrowski, 2010), and aviation (Dror, Kosslyn, & Waag, 1993)
And novel to previous studies, we used both eyetracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate changes in attention allocation and neural activity associated with improvements from training
Eye-tracking data from the current study suggest that the number of saccades between objects decreases as a result of training, which suggests that participants were encoding more complete representations, requiring fewer iterations of the encode–rotate–compare process (Larsen, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Mental rotation is a spatial reasoning task that is pervasive in everyday activities (e.g., driving, reading maps, filling the dishwasher, building Lego sets), and mental rotation performance is predictive of creativity, general intelligence, success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009), and success in several professions, including chemistry (Bodner & Guay, 1997; Harle & Towns, 2011), engineering (Samsudin, Rafi, & Hanif, 2011; Sorby, 2009), surgery (Stransky, Wilcox, & Dubrowski, 2010), and aviation (Dror, Kosslyn, & Waag, 1993). Given ongoing debate about the effectiveness of “brain training” (see Simons et al, 2016, for review), it is critical to understand when and how training can be effective in improving mental rotation performance. Training on mental rotation tasks can lead to stable and transferable improvements in performance (see Uttal et al, 2013, for review), and mental rotation performance is associated with specific patterns of brain activity (Logie, Pernet, Buonocore, & Della Sala, 2011). It is not well understood which cognitive processes are involved in skill improvement. We employed an optimal training method (see Simons et al, 2016) to examine the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with mental rotation improvement

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