Individual differences in mental animation during mechanical reasoning

Abstract

In three experiments we tested the effects of spatial visualization ability on performance of a motion-verification task, in which subjects were shown a diagram of a mechanical system and were asked to verify a sentence stating the motion of one of the system components. We propose that this task involves component processes of (1) sentence comprehension, (2) diagram comprehension, (3) text-diagram integration, and (4) mental animation. Subjects with low spatial ability made more errors than did subjects with high spatial ability on this task, and they made more errors on items in which more system components had to be animated to solve the problem. In contrast, the high-spatial subjects were relatively accurate on all trials. These results indicate that spatial visualization is correlated with accuracy on the motion-verification task and suggest that this correlation is primarily due to the mental animation component of the task. Reaction time and eye-fixation data revealed no differences in how the high- and low-spatial subjects decomposed the task. The data of the two groups of subjects were equally consistent with a piecemeal model of mental animation, in which components are animated one by one in order of the causal chain of events in the system.

Question asking and eye tracking during cognitive disequilibrium: Comprehending illustrated texts on devices when the devices break down

“…We did find that a large proportion of eye fixation sequences followed causal paths. The high incidence of these causal fixation sequences is perfectly compatible with the kinematic-dynamic mental model of devices that has been investigated by Hegarty (Hegarty, 1992;Hegarty & Just, 1993;Hegarty et al, 2002;Hegarty & Sims, 1994) and by . Hegarty has reported that these causal paths are prevalent in mental animations of device operations, in addition to the visual inspection of illustrated texts.…”

Understanding dynamic and static displays: using images to reason dynamically

“…Consistent with other research on static displays (e.g., Hegarty & Sims, 1994), we believe that forecasters animate static displays (or parts of the displays) mentally, and use that information to create a dynamic mental representation of atmospheric dynamics, e.g., how a front would move. Or they blend different weather models to create a dynamic mental representation of the most probable path for a weather system.…”

“…is that they can impose a high working memory load when the task is to reason about a machine in motion (Hegarty & Sims, 1994;Narayanan, Suwa, & Motoda, 1994;Sims & Hegarty, 1997). However, many studies have found that animations by themselves do not improve performance (Byrne, Catrambone, & Stasko, 1999;Mayer & Anderson, 1991;Palmiter & Elkerton, 1993;Palmiter, Elkerton, & Baggett, 1991;Rieber, Boyce, & Assad, 1990) unless they provide more information than static images (Pane, Corbett, & John, 1996;Tversky, Morrison, & Betrancourt, 2002).…”

Does animation enhance learning? A meta-analysis

“…While the conditions of its instructional effectiveness are still unclear, the factors that influence the processing of animation have been largely identified. Three categories may be distinguished; those a) specific to the learners, such as their prior knowledge level (ChanLin, 1998;Kalyuga, 2008) and visuospatial ability (Hegarty & Sims, 1994;Lowe & Boucheix, 2009;Yang, Andre, & Greenbowe, 2003), b) specific to the instructional material, such as the type of dynamic changes within the animation (Lowe, 2003), its perceptual salience (Lowe & Boucheix, 2009;Schnotz & Lowe, 2003), the presence of accompanying information (Ginns, 2005;Moreno & Mayer, 1999;Tabbers, 2001) or the control over the pace of the animation (Fischer, Lowe, & Schwan, 2007;Mayer & Chandler, 2001), and c) specific to the learning context e e.g., the type of knowledge and the instructional domain Schneider, 2007).…”