Abstract
Mental rotation is an important paradigm for spatial ability. Mental-rotation tasks are assumed to involve five or three sequential cognitive-processing states, though this has not been demonstrated experimentally. Here, we investigated how processing states alternate during mental-rotation tasks. Inference was carried out using an advanced statistical modelling and data-driven approach – a discriminative hidden Markov model (dHMM) trained using eye-movement data obtained from an experiment consisting of two different strategies: (I) mentally rotate the right-side figure to be aligned with the left-side figure and (II) mentally rotate the left-side figure to be aligned with the right-side figure. Eye movements were found to contain the necessary information for determining the processing strategy, and the dHMM that best fit our data segmented the mental-rotation process into three hidden states, which we termed encoding and searching, comparison, and searching on one-side pair. Additionally, we applied three classification methods, logistic regression, support vector model and dHMM, of which dHMM predicted the strategies with the highest accuracy (76.8%). Our study did confirm that there are differences in processing states between these two of mental-rotation strategies, and were consistent with the previous suggestion that mental rotation is discrete process that is accomplished in a piecemeal fashion.
Highlights
Spatial abilities are important cognitive skills that are used in various everyday tasks, such as learning the environment, and during academic activities
To capture the relationship between mental-rotation processing and eye movements, we modelled the recorded time series of fixations and saccades by assuming potential states that are supposed indicators of the cognitive system switching between different processing states
This study correlated measurements of eye movements to mental-rotation tasks in an effort to uncover the processes of mental-rotation
Summary
Spatial abilities are important cognitive skills that are used in various everyday tasks, such as learning the environment, and during academic activities. Eye fixation sequences during mental-rotation tasks suggest a piecemeal strategy[3, 4]. The results suggested that three processing stages were involved: (1) search, (2) transformation and comparison, and (3) confirmation of a match or a mismatch between stimuli Their interpretation mostly refers to stage 4 (judgement of parity) of the former processing model with elements of stage 3 (mental rotation of the stimulus) and, secondarily, to stage 2 (identification of stimulus orientation)[9]. Mental rotation may be assumed to process through eye movements, as individuals’ fixations maintaining gaze on a single location[16], are closely related to our ability to visually encode spatially distributed information[3, 17]. Eye-movement behaviour can be sampled at high frequencies (60 Hz~2000 Hz or higher); the individual cognitive processes can be measured directly[3]
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