The Choice of Sports Affects Mental Rotation Performance in Adolescents

Mental rotation abilities of gymnasts and soccer players: a comparison of egocentric and object-based transformations. An exploratory and preliminary study

Background and objectives

The experience obtained from motor expertise may contribute to and enhance the development of particular visuo-spatial abilities. This exploratory and preliminary study compares the response times of a mental rotation task with egocentric and object-based transformation instructions between soccer players of varying performance levels and gymnasts.

Methods

Fifty-six male participants were grouped based on their sports experience. Soccer-specific novices (SS-N: n = 19; age = 15.9 ± 0.87), soccer-specific experts (SS-E: n = 17; age = 16.4 ± 0.70), gymnastic-specific experts (GS-E: n = 10; age = 16.6 ± 1.71), and gymnastic-specific novices (GS-N: n = 10; age = 16.0 ± 1.63) were recruited to perform a perceptual task (recognition of soccer-specific poses) and mental rotation tasks with different stimuli (soccer-specific poses, cubes, line-drawings of hands, letters).

Results

During the perceptual task with instructions on egocentric transformation and soccer-specific poses, we observed that gymnasts had longer response times than soccer players. Our findings also suggest that experts correctly identified most of the poses in terms of accuracy. In the mental rotation task with object-based transformation, gymnasts processed all stimuli, even the soccer-specific poses, more accurately than both soccer groups.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that gymnasts' motor expertise plays a role in their performance on mental rotation tasks involving both egocentric and object-based transformations, regardless of the stimuli presented.

Embodied mental rotation ability in open- and closed-skill sports: pilot study with a new virtual paradigm

Embodied mental rotation is the influence of the body on mental rotation ability. Sports expertise enhances embodied mental rotation ability. However, sport-skill-dependent effects remain unclear. Previous studies refer to the influence of body positions on mental rotation ability. Yet, in sports, the investigation of the effect of simultaneous body and mental rotation movements is essential. Athletes need to constantly mentally and physically adapt to environmental changes and new motor tasks while being in motion themselves. This study aimed to investigate embodied mental rotation ability with simultaneous body and mental rotation in individuals with different sport skills, i.e., in open- and closed-skill sports. Forty-eight men and women, divided into two groups depending on their sport, performed 32 trials of an extended embodied mental rotation task. Simultaneous body and mental rotation were enabled by a novel test method including Virtual Reality. Results revealed shorter response times to the task stimulus in closed-skill sports participants than in open-skill sports participants. This group difference was significant for trials in which rotation directions of the own body and the mental rotation stimulus were aligned. The results might be related to sport-specific skill development processes. Motor imitation skills, as relevant in many closed-skill sports, may facilitate cognitive processes when the motion direction of the own body and of the mental rotation stimulus are aligned. The novel test method identifies potential applications that should be increasingly explored in the future, both for cognitive science and sports research.

Effect of dynamic balance on human mental rotation task in female badminton vs. volleyball players

Background

The present study aims to compare the mental rotation performance between two non-contact sports (i.e., badminton and volleyball) in different upright conditions (i.e., with and without dynamic balance).

Methods

Thirty-five female sports and physical education students voluntarily participated in the experiment, including fourteen specialists in badminton and twenty-one specialists in volleyball. The experiment involved a mental body rotation task with or without balance exercises on a wobble board.

Results

Badminton players outperformed volleyball players in the mental rotation tasks regardless of balance. More interestingly, the results revealed an overall decrease in reaction times when participants performed balance exercises simultaneously with mental rotation.

Discussion

Our findings suggest that introducing dynamic balance on a wobble board has immediate beneficial effects on the mental rotation performance of female badminton and volleyball players. These findings are discussed in the context of sport specificities and cognitive processing framework.

A scoping review and index of body stimuli in psychological science

Naturalistic body stimuli are necessary for understanding many aspects of human psychology, yet there are no centralized databases of body stimuli. Furthermore, there are a high number of independently developed stimulus sets lacking in standardization and reproducibility potential, and a general lack of organization, contributing to issues of both replicability and generalizability in body-related research. We conducted a comprehensive scoping review to index and explore existing naturalistic whole-body stimuli. Our research questions were as follows: (1) What sets of naturalistic human whole-body stimuli are present in the literature? And (2) On what factors (e.g., demographics, emotion expression) do these stimuli vary? To be included, stimulus sets had to (1) include human bodies as stimuli; (2) be photographs, videos, or other depictions of real human bodies (not computer generated, drawn, etc.); (3) include the whole body (defined as torso, arms, and legs); and (4) could include edited images, but still had to be recognizable as human bodies. We identified a relatively large number of existing stimulus sets (N = 79) which offered relative variability in terms of main manipulated factors and the degree of visual information included (i.e., inclusion of heads and/or faces). However, stimulus sets were demographically homogenous, skewed towards White, young adult, and female bodies. We identified significant issues in reporting and availability practices, posing a challenge to the generalizability, reliability, and reproducibility of body-related research. Accordingly, we urge researchers to adopt transparent and accessible practices and to take steps to diversify body stimuli.

Does mindfulness help to overcome stereotype threat in mental rotation in younger and older adolescents?

We investigated gender differences in mental rotation performance in younger and older adolescents and effects of stereotype threat activation and a short mindfulness induction. Two hundred fifty younger adolescents from grades 5, 6, and 7 (119 boys) and 152 older adolescents from grades 10, 11, and 12 (80 boys) were divided into four groups with or without a mindfulness induction and with or without stereotype threat activation. All participants solved a mental rotation test and filled out a questionnaire about their gender stereotype beliefs and perceived abilities of masculine and feminine activities. Results illustrate that older adolescents outperformed younger adolescents, and gender differences in favor of males appeared only in the older age group. Independent of gender, the mindfulness induction had a significantly positive effect on adolescents' mental rotation performance that was significant only in the older age group. No effect of the stereotype activation was found. For gender stereotype beliefs and perceived abilities of gendered activities, the mindfulness intervention enhanced male stereotype beliefs and participants' perceived ability of masculine activities. A short mindfulness induction seems to have an enhancing effect on a subsequently performed stereotypically masculine cognitive task and consequently on adolescents' male stereotype beliefs and their perceived ability in masculine activities.

The Mental Rotation Ability of Expert Basketball Players: Identifying On-Court Plays

Purpose: The purpose was (1) to test a new version of a mental rotation task (MRT), which assesses mental rotation abilities of men and women for sport-specific items, and (2) to investigate potential differences in MRT performance, which are based on athletic expertise. Methods: Eighty-eight basketball experts (42 females) and 123 novices (64 females) were tested with a paper-and-pencil version of the "Mental Rotation Task-Basketball (MRT-BB)", which is similar to the original MRT. Instead of three-dimensional cubes, six different basketball plays were used as stimuli. The criterion stimulus of the 24 items was always displayed in an upright orientation (basket on top), located on the left side of the sheet. In addition, two "correct" alternatives (one stimulus rotated by 90° to the left or right and one by 180°) and two "incorrect" alternatives (either rotated mirror-images of the criterion stimulus or rotated images of a different play) were displayed in different positions of the same row. The task was to identify the "correct" alternatives. Results: Results demonstrated (a) an effect of sex, with more items solved for male participants as compared to female participants, and (b) an effect of expertise, with better performance of expert players than of novices. Conclusions: Male and female basketball experts show better mental rotation skills for sport-specific stimulus material. The MRT-BB extends standard tests of mental rotation to sport-specific stimulus material and can be used to test the sport-specific mental rotation skills of basketball players.