Diagnostics of spatial thinking with eye movement data

The ability of spatial thinking is an important intelligence factor that is linked to educational success in mathematics, science and technology. Spatial thinking also plays an important role in learning with multimedia and understanding complex visualizations. The ability of spatial thinking is measured with tasks in which people are asked to mentally carry out certain spatial transformations. Such imagined transformations include, for example, rotating objects (mental rotation), changing one's own spatial perspective (change of perspective) or multi-step, more complex transformations (visualization).

The tasks used to date to measure ability – particularly in research, but also in intelligence tests – are not very standardized. Studies show that many tests have problems when examining how people actually solve the tasks. In some cases, no spatial transformations are necessary for this, and it is also possible to proceed analytically (e.g. according to the exclusion principle) or by mentally transforming the visual-spatial information into verbal information. For reasons of validity and to improve the efficiency of the measurement, it is therefore interesting to make the test subjects' solution strategies visible. Does a person systematically recognize and compare relevant picture elements in a complex visual task, and does he or she apply this strategy to different items? Eye movement patterns can provide valuable insights into this.

However, eye movement analyses are not meaningfully possible with the spatial reasoning tests available to date. For example, there are too few similarly constructed tasks. To solve this and other problems, new spatial reasoning tests have been developed for the factors visualization and mental rotation. The test for visualization has several levels of difficulty, each with similarly constructed, homogeneous items, and has been validated using various conventional tests. Several ongoing studies are investigating the potential of eye movements to identify solution strategies and contribute to the efficient prediction of spatial reasoning ability. In addition, other parameters are used to determine ability, in particular the measurement of cognitive load using pupillometry.

Corresponding researcher: Dr. Benedict C. O. F. Fehringer 

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Fehringer, B. C. (2020, June). One threshold to rule them all? Modification of the Index of Pupillary Activity to optimize the indication of cognitive load. In ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (pp. 1–5). https://doi.org/10.1145/3379156.3391341