Dynamic Spatial Ability Research Articles

Psychometric Tests and Spatial Navigation: Data From the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging.

Spatial cognition is the process by which individuals interact with their spatial environment. Spatial cognition encompasses the specific skills of spatial memory, spatial orientation, and spatial navigation. Prior studies have shown an association between psychometric tests of spatial ability and self-reported or virtual measures of spatial navigation. In this study, we examined whether psychometric spatial cognitive tests predict performance on a dynamic spatial navigation task that involves movement through an environment. We recruited 151 community-dwelling adult participants [mean (SD) age 69.7 (13.6), range 24.6–93.2] from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA). Spatial navigation ability was assessed using the triangle completion task (TCT), and two quantities, the angle and distance of deviation, were computed. Visuospatial cognitive ability was assessed primarily using the Card Rotations Test. Additional tests of executive function, memory, and attention were also administered. In multiple linear regression analyses adjusting for age, sex, race, and education, cognitive tests of visuospatial ability, executive function, and perceptual motor speed and integration were significantly associated with spatial navigation, as determined by performance on the TCT. These findings suggest that dynamic spatial navigation ability is related to spatial memory, executive function, and motor processing speed.

Evidence of a Relationship Between Mental Rotation Skills and Performance in a 3D Puzzle Game

Spatial reasoning is an ability that people utilize on a daily basis, that has also been linked to performance in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. However, there are very few widely available opportunities to train spatial reasoning skills that have been proven to be effective tools. As a first step in the validation process, this study sought to establish whether performance on a measure of intrinsic and dynamic spatial reasoning ability was related to performance within Optica, a mobile puzzle game. To investigate this relationship, 168 middle school students participated in a within-subjects study over three days. The results of this study have been promising, as our analysis indicated that there was a significant relationship between the number of levels completed in Optica and score on the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test - Revised: Visualization of Rotations (Revised PSVT: R).

Spatial cognition and science achievement: The contribution of intrinsic and extrinsic spatial skills from 7 to 11 years.

BackgroundPrior longitudinal and correlational research with adults and adolescents indicates that spatial ability is a predictor of science learning and achievement. However, there is little research to date with primary‐school aged children that addresses this relationship. Understanding this association has the potential to inform curriculum design and support the development of early interventions.AimsThis study examined the relationship between primary‐school children's spatial skills and their science achievement.MethodChildren aged 7–11 years (N = 123) completed a battery of five spatial tasks, based on a model of spatial ability in which skills fall along two dimensions: intrinsic–extrinsic; static–dynamic. Participants also completed a curriculum‐based science assessment.ResultsControlling for verbal ability and age, mental folding (intrinsic–dynamic spatial ability), and spatial scaling (extrinsic–static spatial ability) each emerged as unique predictors of overall science scores, with mental folding a stronger predictor than spatial scaling. These spatial skills combined accounted for 8% of the variance in science scores. When considered by scientific discipline, mental folding uniquely predicted both physics and biology scores, and spatial scaling accounted for additional variance in biology and variance in chemistry scores. The children's embedded figures task (intrinsic–static spatial ability) only accounted for variance in chemistry scores. The patterns of association were consistent across the age range.ConclusionSpatial skills, particularly mental folding, spatial scaling, and disembedding, are predictive of 7‐ to 11‐year‐olds’ science achievement. These skills make a similar contribution to performance for each age group.

The role of dynamic spatial ability in geoscience text comprehension

The current experiment investigated the effects of a dynamic spatial ability on comprehension of a geoscience text on plate tectonics and the causes of volcanic activity. 162 undergraduates (54% female) from a large public university who had little prior knowledge of this science content area were asked to learn about plate tectonics. Measures of spatial ability and working memory capacity were used to predict comprehension from a text that contained either no images, static images, or animated versions of the static images. Only the dynamic spatial ability measure interacted with the type of illustrations contained in the text, and was shown to be especially relevant for comprehension when readers did not receive animations. These results demonstrate a novel influence of individual differences in dynamic spatial ability on comprehension of text describing dynamic spatial phenomena.

Impact of Visuospatial Characteristics of Video Games on Improvements in Cognitive Abilities

The current study aimed to understand the effects of playing video games on navigation skills, spatial cognitive abilities and speed of processing, and to examine the characteristics of games and training hours impacting video game training. Participants were assigned to one of four groups; First Person Shooter (FPS) game training group, Third Person Shooter (TPS) game training group, Control puzzle game training group, and control non-training group. Participants in training groups played the selected games for 30 hours in total. Performances in maze tasks, spatial attention, mental rotation and speed of processing were measured at four time points (pretraining, post-10 hours, 20 hours and 30 hours training) to investigate improvements over the time. The results showed the FPS game playing and not the TPS or puzzle game playing enhanced visual attention ability at both 20° and 30° eccentricity. This result indicates viewpoints of video game are important characteristics which may impact differently on cognitive ability. However, no significant improvement was found in navigation skills, suggesting playing FPS game may not improve dynamic and larger-scaled spatial abilities beyond spatial attention.

Video game experience predicts virtual, but not real navigation performance

In recent years, studies have shown that video game experience is related to improvements across a variety of cognitive and visuospatial tasks. This study investigated the relationship between prior video game experience and spatial performance in virtual and real environments. Across two experiments, gaming experience was related to performance in desktop virtual environments; those with more video game experience were more accurate in pointing to nonvisible targets. In contrast, gaming experience was unrelated to three different real environment tasks, suggesting that video games may primarily influence perceptual and cognitive abilities in the visual domain over abilities that also involve kinesthetic or vestibular input. Contrary to expectations, gaming experience was also related to performance in immersive virtual environments, which may be related to the use of a joystick interface during immersive travel. Video game experience was also positively related to performance in a dynamic spatial task and to verbal SAT and math SAT scores. Sex differences in desktop virtual navigation and dynamic spatial ability were eliminated when game experience was included as a covariate.

Sex differences in dynamic spatial ability: The unsolved question of performance factors

Males and females differ in several cognitive abilities, although the largest gap can be found in spatial ability. Some published studies make the claim that performance factors, which can be either subject- or task-related variables, explain these differences. However, previous studies in which performance factors were measured have focused on static spatial tests. Little is known about the role of performance factors in dynamic spatial tasks. In the present study, we analyzed a sample of 2624 university graduates to test the role of three performance factors (response latency, response frequency, and invested time) derived from the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (SODT-R; Santacreu, 1999). The results showed that males and females appear to cope with the dynamic task in different ways. However, males outperformed females even when the effects of the performance factors were partialed out; that is, the assessed performance factors did not explain much of the sex-related variance. Alternative ways of measuring performance factors will be needed if they are to explain sex differences in dynamic spatial ability.

Dynamic Spatial Ability: An Exploratory Analysis and a Confirmatory Study

Spatial ability is included in nearly every multiple aptitude battery. However, it has been defined and evaluated in such a variety of ways that it is difficult to be precise about the meaning of the concept. A first study addresses the spatial literature, considers several measures, and empirically explores the dimensionality of the spatial domain. Nine spatial ability tests and 1 computer- administered measure were administered to a total of 104 volunteers. Results from the exploratory factor analysis identified 3 main factors: visualization, spatial relations, and dynamic spatial ability. A second study was conducted to cross-validate this factor structure. A total of 141 participants were involved in this study. Participants were recruited from professional training domains in which spatial ability has been considered important for successful performance: air traffic control, piloting, civil engineering, and architecture. Cross-validation was obtained through a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In general, both empirical studies confirm the existence of dynamic spatial ability as a distinct dimension within the spatial domain.

Dynamic Spatial Ability and Psychomotor Performance

Dynamic spatial ability is one's ability to estimate when a moving object will reach a destination, or one's skill in making time-to-contact (TTC) judgments. In 2 studies, we investigated the nature of dynamic spatial ability and its role in psychomotor (PM) task performance. In the first study, 405 basic military trainees were given both spatial and nonspatial versions of TTC and comparative arrival-time tasks, and we found that the spatial and nonspatial versions of the tasks were more highly correlated than the spatial tasks were to each other, suggesting that a timing, rather than a spatial, mechanism underlies performance of dynamic spatial tasks. In the second study with 376 military trainees, we found that performance on a set of PM tasks was predicted by a general working-memory (WM) Capacity factor (r = .45) and an orthogonal Temporal Processing (TP) factor (r = .55), suggesting the importance of the dynamic spatial, or of the TP factor, in many real-world activities.

Cellular automata and geographic information systems

Contemporary geographic information systems (GIS) suffer from a variety of problems, These include poor performance for many operators, poor ability to handle dynamic spatial models, and poor handling of the temporal dimension. Cellular automata (CA) have much in common with raster GIS and also excel in many of the areas in which GIS are deficient. Specifically, CA provide explicit handling of dynamic spatial models and time. In addition, if special hardware—cellular automata machines—are used, the potential for considerable performance benefits exists. Many spatial analytical operators behave, in effect, as CA, with the specific GIS functions representing the CA transition rules. Examples of such operations include filtering and diffusion. If the spatial operators are considered to be CA, an improved ability to characterize the operators mathematically is achieved, resulting in an improved dynamic spatial modeling ability. In this research the similarities between the two models (GIS and CA) are examined and the ability to implement each in the other is demonstrated. In addition, the advantages of integration of the two systems, by means of a cellular automata machine as the analytical engine for GIS, are discussed.

Gender differences in dynamic spatial abilities

Gender differences in spatial ability were evaluated for two computerized dynamic (one power and one speed) and two static paper and pencil (one power and one speed) tests over sessions. Four factors were evaluated in a factorial design: gender, practice (i.e. session), paper and pencil vs dynamic (i.e. computerized) spatial tests, and power vs speed. A total of 250 paid volunteer men and women were tested in a counterbalanced design over two sessions. Results revealed two significant ( P < 0.05) triple interactions involving gender, session, and power vs speed as well as dynamic vs paper and pencil tests. Although men generally did better than women and all subjects improved with practice, women improved at a faster rate for the speeded computer task and were not statistically different from the men at session 2. Future research should be directed toward two main thrusts: the effects of practice on the power tests and the effect of practice on the predictive validity of the speeded computerized tests.

Mental rotation of static and dynamic figures

Previous studies comparing performance on standard (i.e., static) and dynamic spatial test items have concluded that the two item types measure different abilities. Such conclusions about the uniqueness of static and dynamic spatial abilities seem premature, however, since only a limited number of dynamic spatial tasks have been utilized in research and these have differed markedly from their static counterparts. In the present studies, tasks were designed to require a common mental operation (mental rotation) under static and dynamic conditions. Correlations between static and dynamic performance ranged from .80 to .90. This appears to suggest that the emergence of a unique dynamic ability factor depends on the utilization of certain specialized tasks (e.g., arrival time tasks) with mental operations much different than those required by conventional spatial tests. In other words, it is apparently the requirement for different cognitive processes and not the processing of stimulus motion per se that distinguishes performance on some dynamic tasks from performance on some standard static tasks.

Dynamic spatial performance and general intelligence

A computerized video-game-like dynamic spatial ability measure and a paper-and-pencil group test of intelligence were administered to 94 university students. The purpose of the study was threefold: (a) to evaluate the reliability of the dynamic spatial measure; (b) to investigate the extent to which the dynamic spatial measure is saturated with variance associated with traditional measures of fluid and crystallized intellectual ability; and (c) to explore the possibility that dynamic computer based performance measures define factors that are distinct from those associated with traditional paper-and-pencil measures. The number of times the participant hit a moving target served as the dependent variable for the dynamic spatial measure. Number of hits proved to be correlated with Performance IQ, but was not significantly correlated with Verbal IQ. Maximum likelihood factor analysis revealed that the dynamic spatial measure did not load substantially on a factor of general intellectual ability but provided additional evidence that it is related to a performance component.

Comparing the Tortoise and the Hare: Gender Differences and Experience in Dynamic Spatial Reasoning Tasks

Recent research suggests that dynamic spatial reasoning tasks show more robust gender differences than static spatial reasoning tasks. These differences have implications for selection procedures based on aptitude test scores. Two experiments were therefore designed to examine the locus of such gender differences. In Experiment 1, 82 males and 82 females performed two separate tasks: judging the relative velocity of moving objects and judging their relative distances from target destinations. Significant gender differences occurred only for relative velocity judgments and were partially related to prior experience. A second experiment therefore tested the effects of practice and feedback on performance judging relative velocity. Male and female performance differences were again found, and performance improved equally as a result of feedback. Consistent with contemporary views of aptitude and assessment, the data suggest that equitable assessment of dynamic spatial abilities requires a determination of experiential history and learning rates as well as absolute performance levels.

A computer-based test battery for the assessment of static and dynamic spatial reasoning abilities

A battery of 10 computerized tests of spatial ability is described. It includes 5 tests that require reasoning about static spatial displays and 5 tests that require reasoning about dynamically displayed spatial information. An integrated software package for task presentation and data analysis is described, along with a summary of results from a validation study comparing performance on the computer-based tests with performance on standardized paper-and-pencil tests of spatial abilities. Finally, research applications of the current battery are discussed.