Breaking new ground in the mind: an initial study of mental brittle transformation and mental rigid rotation in science experts

Abstract

The current study examines the spatial skills employed in different spatial reasoning tasks, by asking how science experts who are practiced in different types of visualizations perform on different spatial tasks. Specifically, the current study examines the varieties of mental transformations. We hypothesize that there may be two broad classes of mental transformations: rigid body mental transformations and non-rigid mental transformations. We focus on the disciplines of geology and organic chemistry because different types of transformations are central to the two disciplines: While geologists and organic chemists may both confront rotation in the practice of their profession, only geologists confront brittle transformations. A new instrument was developed to measure mental brittle transformation (visualizing breaking). Geologists and organic chemists performed similarly on a measure of mental rotation, while geologists outperformed organic chemists on the mental brittle transformation test. The differential pattern of skill on the two tests for the two groups of experts suggests that mental brittle transformation and mental rotation are different spatial skills. The roles of domain general cognitive resources (attentional control, spatial working memory, and perceptual filling in) and strategy in completing mental brittle transformation are discussed. The current study illustrates how ecological and interdisciplinary approaches complement traditional cognitive science to offer a comprehensive approach to understanding the nature of spatial thinking.

Situating space: using a discipline-focused lens to examine spatial thinking skills

“…Psychometric measures of spatial thinking commonly employ tasks involving rigid mental transformations (Hegarty & Waller, 2004;Shepard & Metzler, 1971), transformations in which the distance between two points on an object stays the same, such as in mental rotation. Work by Atit et al (2013) as well as Resnick and Shipley (2013) shows that skills for rigid and non-rigid mental transformations are separable, indicating that the current psychometric measures of spatial thinking are not capturing all of the spatial skills earth scientists use to solve the spatial problems they encounter within their domains.…”

“…First, more researchers studying the connections between spatial thinking and STEM domains should ground their investigations within STEM practices to understand the range of spatial skills required in those domains. Tests of fundamental spatial skills have largely been developed outside of STEM domains (Guay, 1977;Shepard & Metzler, 1971) and thus do not capture the variety of skills utilized by practitioners when working in their disciplines (Atit et al, 2013;Resnick & Shipley, 2013). Moreover, the psychometric measures do not account for the context-dependent nature of spatial thinking in STEM.…”

Relational Reasoning in Science, Medicine, and Engineering

“…Instead, the sciences, technological fields, engineering, and mathematics may require varied profiles of cognitive abilities for student and professional success. For example, it has long been hypothesized that STEM fields require different amounts of visuo-spatial rotation, an idea that has been supported by some data (Resnick and Shipley 2013). Relational reasoning may be no exception, and different domains within STEM may place greater emphasis on particular forms of the construct, or in particular reasoning contexts (e.g., collaborative or individual).…”

Promoting Sketching in Introductory Geoscience Courses: CogSketch Geoscience Worksheets

“…Reasoning about dynamic processes includes all spatial reasoning that involves movement or change. Geologists are skilled in reasoning about a wide range of transformations over time, including both brittle deformation (e.g., breaking) (Resnick & Shipley, ) and plastic deformation (e.g., bending) (Atit, Shipley, & Tikoff, ), and recognizing causal relationships (Jee et al., , ). For the most part, changes caused by geological processes cannot be observed directly, because the changes that happen during a human lifetime are insignificant, but over geologic time the cumulative effect of those changes is profound.…”