One brick at a time: Building a developmental profile of spatial abilities

Abstract

Spatial abilities are not only fundamental for activities of daily living, but they are also markers of academic and professional success. It has remained a challenge, however, to understand their development across childhood and adolescence, partly because of the lack of spatial tasks that are appropriate across age groups. For example, the well‐established paper‐based mental rotation test (MRT) has been shown to be too difficult for children. In the current study, we tested girls and boys in three age groups: younger children (5–8‐years‐old), older children (9–12), and adolescents (13–17) on a hands‐on visuospatial task using toy bricks: the brick‐building task (BBT). Children completed a low‐ and a high‐mental rotation demand (LMR and HMR) version of the BBT and the paper‐based MRT. Correlations were found between all tasks. Children, especially females, found the HMR more challenging than the LMR condition, but all children successfully completed the BBT. In contrast, the MRT was too difficult for the younger children to solve performing at chance. Given this result and that the BBT is a game‐like, 3D, interactive task, the BBT could be used to examine the biological and/or environmental factors that affect the early development of visuospatial abilities.

A Novel Approach to Assessing Infant and Child Mental Rotation

“…The second challenge is that there are a wide range of tasks for indexing mental rotation in children, and tasks designed for children of the same age group can vary considerably. Studies with preschoolers and young school-aged children use tasks such as the Picture Rotation Task ( Quaiser-Pohl 2003 ), Children’s Mental Transformation Task ( Levine et al 1999 ), Brick Building Task ( Aguilar Ramirez et al 2021 ), the primary mental abilities–space relations test ( Thurstone 1957 ), or other tasks ( Estes 1998 ). These tasks often index different measures of success to indicate mental rotation (e.g., manually placing a piece into a puzzle vs. building a configuration vs. selecting a response option vs. pointing) and vary in terms of the complexity of stimuli (e.g., animals vs. abstract shapes), the number of selection options available, the motor demands (e.g., button press vs. point vs. object manipulation vs. verbal response vs. circling an answer on a paper form), and the method of administration (e.g., paper forms vs. Zoom vs. touchscreens vs. computers vs. naturalistic play).…”