Individual differences in different level mental rotation tasks: An eye movement study

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory study was to probe the cognitive processes of undergraduate students at varying mental rotation ability (MRA) levels during mental rotation tasks. The study group consisted of 14 undergraduate students from the Psychological Counseling and Guidance Department and Computer Education and Instructional Technologies Department at Hacettepe University. Firstly, participants' mental rotation ability levels were determined. Secondly, participants were grouped according to their mental rotation test scores. Then, they were given two digital tangram problems with different difficulty levels. During their interaction with Tangram problems, their eye movements were recorded. The Mann Whitney U test was run to compare differences in eye movements across different mental rotation ability level groups. As a result, it was found that while there were significant differences in eye movement metrics between different mental rotation ability levels for the easy tangram problem, there were no significant differences observed in eye movement metrics for the difficult tangram problem. In addition, examining completion time showed that while easy tangram problem completion time was significantly shorter for people with a higher score on the mental rotation test, there were no significant differences between completion times of different level mental rotation ability groups when solving the difficult tangram problem. Since the spatial ability is an important predictor of task performance and completion time, it is suggested that adaptive learning environments should be designed to compensate for low MRA level learners.