Capacity for Visual Features in Mental Rotation

Abstract

Although mental rotation is a core component of scientific reasoning, we still know little about its underlying mechanism. For instance - how much visual information can we rotate at once? Participants rotated a simple multi-part shape, requiring them to maintain attachments between features and moving parts. The capacity of this aspect of mental rotation was strikingly low – only one feature could remain attached to one part. Behavioral and eyetracking data showed that this single feature remained ‘glued’ via a singular focus of attention, typically on the object’s top. We argue that the architecture of the human visual system is not suited for keeping multiple features attached to multiple parts during mental rotation. Such measurement of the capacity limits may prove to be a critical step in dissecting the suite of visuospatial tools involved in mental rotation, leading to insights for improvement of pedagogy in science education contexts.

Gender differences in mental rotation strategy depend on degree of autistic traits

“…In general, participants tend to favor the top corner, in terms of both number and duration of fixations, consistent with previous research [Xu & Franconeri, ]; however, at both the lowest and highest rotation angles, participants favor the bottom corners of the cube figures. This could be indicative of a possible strategy when comparing two cube figures.…”

“…Similarly, we expect that eye movement patterns would shift in response to increased angles of rotation. Specifically, because participants may have a possible preference for tops of objects, it is hypothesized that participants would rely more on the top corner with low rotation angles [Xu & Franconeri, ]. It is also hypothesized that men would be more accurate than women [Linn & Petersen, ; Voyer et al, ; Voyer, ].…”

Visual routines for extracting magnitude relations

“…Another open question is how strongly children would rely on vertical spatial routines, such as attending to a top bar first if the bars extended horizontally (a Brow graph^as opposed to a Bcolumn graph^). Previous studies have established an attentional bias for the top in adults (Clark & Chase, 1972;Xu & Franconeri, 2015). Children also might show an upwards bias, because many school-related materials, such as text and charts, begin at the top (Tversky, 2011).…”

“…This preference for framing a relation as Babove^seemed to be due to an attentional bias for the top object (which is common in other tasks, see Xu & Franconeri, 2015); the effect weakened under instructions to attend to the bottom. These results are all consistent with the idea that the way that a viewer isolates objects with attention over time can control the relational description that they extract from a scene.…”

Promoting Sketching in Introductory Geoscience Courses: CogSketch Geoscience Worksheets

“…Students will succeed in this task if they notice how the magnetic inclination of an individual rock can be related to a latitudinal position on the Earth and how inclination changes with latitude. The process of moving and rotating objects in CogSketch allows students to match the rocks to the Earth's magnetic field (a task that geologists do mentally) without attempting to visualize the entire diagram while mentally rotating an object, which is a difficult mental task (Xu & Franconeri, ). Lastly, instead of creating the analogy of the magnetic inclination of the rock to the diagram in a student's mind, students physically align the two objects.…”