Spatial ability or visuo-spatial ability is the capacity to understand, reason, and remember the visual and spatial relations among objects or space. Visual-spatial abilities are used for everyday use from navigation, understanding or fixing equipment, understanding or estimating distance and measurement, and performing on a job. Spatial abilities are also important for success in fields such as sports, technical aptitude, mathematics, natural sciences, engineering, economic forecasting, meteorology, chemistry and physics.
Definition and types Spatial ability is the capacity to understand, reason and remember the visual and spatial relations among objects or space. There are four common types of spatial abilities: spatial or visuo-spatial perception, spatial visualization, mental folding and mental rotation. Each of these abilities has unique properties and importance to many types of tasks whether in certain jobs or everyday life. For example, spatial perception is defined as the ability to perceive spatial relationships with respect to the orientation of one's body despite distracting information. Mental rotation on the other hand is the mental ability to manipulate and rotate 2D or 3D objects in space quickly and accurately. Lastly, spatial visualization is characterized as complicated multi-step manipulations of spatially presented information. These three abilities are mediated and supported by a fourth spatial cognitive factor known as spatial working memory. Spatial working memory is the ability to temporarily store a certain amount of visual-spatial memories under attentional control in order to complete a task.
Spatial perception
Spatial perception is defined as the ability to perceive spatial relationships in respect to the orientation of one's body despite distracting information. It consists of being able to perceive and visually understand outside spatial information such as features, properties, measurement, shapes, position and motion. For example, when one is navigating through a dense forest they are using spatial perception and awareness. Another example is when trying to understand the relations and mechanics inside of a car, they are relying on their spatial perception to understand its visual framework. Tests that measure spatial perception include the rod and frame test, where subjects must place a rod vertically while viewing a frame orientation of 22 degrees in angle, or the water-level task, where subjects have to draw or identify a horizontal line in a tilted bottle. Spatial perception is also very relevant in sports. For example, a study found that cricket players who were faster at picking up information from briefly presented visual displays were significantly better batsmen in an actual game. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Vision found that soccer players had higher perceptual ability for body kinematics such as processing multitasking crowd scenes which involve pedestrians crossing a street or complex dynamic visual scenes. Another study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics on fencing athletes found that achievement level was highly correlated with spatial perceptual skills such as visual discrimination, visual-spatial relationships, visual sequential memory, narrow attentional focus and visual information processing. A review published in the journal Neuropsychologia found that spatial perception also involves semantic processing and the attribution of meaning to an object. The review also found that spatial perception involves the human visual system in the brain and the parietal lobule which is responsible for visuomotor processing and visually goal-directed action. Studies have also found that individuals who played first person shooting games had better spatial perceptual skills like faster and more accurate performance in a peripheral and identification task while simultaneously performing a central search. Researchers suggested that, in addition to enhancing the ability to divide attention, playing action games significantly enhances perceptual skills like top-down guidance of attention to possible target locations.
Mental rotation
Mental rotation is the ability to mentally represent and rotate 2D and 3D objects in space quickly and accurately, while the object's features remain unchanged. Same effects have been seen playing action video games such as Unreal Tournament as well as the popular mainstream game Tetris. Jigsaw puzzles and Rubik's Cube are also activities that involve higher level of mental rotation and can be practiced to improve spatial abilities over time. Mental rotation is also unique and distinct from the other spatial abilities because it also involves areas associated with motor simulation in the brain.
Spatial visualization
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
