Mental rotation: a task for the assessment of visuospatial skills of children

The role of spatial and spatial-temporal analysis in children's causal cognition of continuous processes

Past research has largely ignored children's ability to conjointly manipulate spatial and temporal information, but there are indications that the capacity to do so may provide important support for reasoning about causal processes. We hypothesised that spatial-temporal thinking is central to children's ability to identify the invisible mechanisms that tie cause and effect together in continuous casual processes, which are focal in primary school science and crucial to understanding of the natural world. We investigated this in two studies (N = 107, N = 124), employing two methodologies, one shorter, the other more in depth. Further tasks assessed spatial-temporal (flow of liquid, extrapolation of relative speed, distance-time-velocity), spatial (two mental rotation, paper folding), verbal (expressive vocabulary), and nonverbal (block design) ability. Age dependent patterns were detected for both causal and predictor tasks. Two spatial-temporal tasks were unique and central predictors of children's causal reasoning, especially inference of mechanism. Nonverbal ability predicted the simpler components of causal reasoning. One mental rotation task predicted only young children's causal thinking. Verbal ability became significant when the sample included children from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Causal reasoning about continuous processes, including inferences of causal mechanism, appears to be within the reach of children from school entry age, but mechanism inference is uncommon. Analytic forms of spatial-temporal capacity seem to be important requirements for children to progress to this rather than merely perceptual forms.

Imagery and perceptual basis of matching tasks in young children

Object identification in perceptual tests may include constituents of mental rotation. A matching-to-sample task was conducted with same or different objects to look for evidence of rotation. Elementary schoolchildren (6 to 8 years old) in Grades 1 to 4 (N = 264) participated, using the inclined Flags Test and the Water Level Test to ensure that children can use kinematic imagery for the Flags Test even if they used static imagery for the Water Level Test. Performance on the inclined Flags Test varied by age group. Use of implicit mental rotation of the inclined object was inferred in recognition. Also, children at the pre-operational stage showed a rotational effect, i.e., they could transform the object by turning it, thereby confirming kinematic imagery is used from age 6. As a consequence, solving both rotation tasks may require not only recognition of object frames but also objects internal to the frame.

Autonomic physiological activity in mental rotation tasks

The electrodermal response (EDR) during a mental rotation (MR) task performance was investigated. For 6 males and 8 females (16-25 years old) there was a progressive increase in the number of EDRs as the angle of rotation (complexity) of the task was increased. These results support previous findings that autonomic physiological activity varies with the amount of information processing or its difficulty.