Hegarty, M., & Sims, V. K. (1994). Individual differences in mental animation during mechanical reasoning. Memory and Cognition, 22(4), 411-430.

Hegarty, M.; Sims, V.

1994

Hegarty, M., & Sims, V. K. (1994). Individual differences in mental animation during mechanical reasoning. Memory and Cognition, 22(4), 411-430.

3

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 law 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.

The results from Experiment 3 showed that although the combined processes of sentence comprehension and text-diagram integration are a significant source of error in the motion-verification task, errors on these processes are not related to spatial visualization ability. The results also showed that although verbal ability is correlated with accuracy in the motion-verification task, spatial visualization has an effect on performance that is independent of the effect of verbal ability on performance. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the sentencecomprehension and text-diagram integration processes are independent of mental animation in that they do not affect either accuracy or speed of mental animation.

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