Spatial Ability

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Acquisition of spatial reasoning begins in vitro and it is critical to survival. Human activity, thought, and locomotion are contextualized by the space that surrounds us. Our spatial ability is our cognitive capacity to understand, reason, and remember the spatial relations among objects or space. From infancy, the human mind is navigating spatially to guide action; therefore spatial ability involves our evolving understanding of the world exterior to our bodies as well as our mental processing of outside information and how we reason with the semantics of visual representation.

Overview

The ability to perceive spatial relationships in respect to the orientation of one’s body involves being able to perceive and visually understand outside spatial information including features, properties, measurement, shapes, position, and motion. Inferences from visuospatial information are needed to ensure survival as well as the ability to perceive the world as it is. Humans also need to anticipate the world as it will be, which refers to timing. Spatial thought, language, and graphics are important to modern life, but have been seminal in cognitively influencing the course of human affairs even before written language. For example, when a person is navigating through a crowded intersection, he or she utilizes spatial perception and awareness.

Children who do not know where their bodies are in space get injured. The body’s different sensory systems (head, hands, legs, and feet) serve as experiential conduits of mental cognition through which thoughts are manifested in the world through action. In young children, bodily experience is an intricate part of early word learning, when they experience cause and effect in physical space. Children learn words by tagging while they physically move and interact with the world around them; their bodies, in this sense, are foundational to all learning since bodily actions make things happen in the world, and subsequently create meaning. The physical world offers rich regularities that organize and give meaning to perception, action, and ultimately mental function.

Mapping and Transformations. Spatial ability is the capacity to remember and understand spatial relationships among objects. It is a unique kind of intelligence consisting of numerous sub-skills. These are very important to daily life because they orient humans to their environment. The simplest recognition requires going beyond interpreting given information. A way to go beyond the information given is to make inferences by transforming that information by applying deductive reasoning with representations and transformations. Mapping abstract elements is a natural function of life.

Gestalt principles of perceptual representations require grouping by similarity, proximity, common fate, and quality continuity. By manipulating representations, new conclusions can be received. Imagery is internalized perception—that is, images are like internalized perceptions— whereas transformation of images is like transformations of things in the world. Mental images resemble perception, and mental transformations of images resemble observable changes in things in the world, as with mental rotation, or those perceptual processes done on things in the world, as with mental scanning.

Visuospatial Reasoning. Cognitive logic, or visuospatial reasoning, is used to determine how bits of information mesh. It requires decision making as to whether conclusions result from logical premises. Visuospatial thinking is fundamental to most processes. Inference is manifested in the interaction between mind and body that is manifested in hand gestures, suggesting that acts of gesturing promote spatial reasoning. There is a correspondence between internal and external perspectives and the mental transformations of self and other, and the human mind is flexible enough to apply both.

For, example, in describing environments, gestures reject the plane, the linguistic perspective that they adapt affecting motor actions that reflect the character of mental actions, employing “route” and “survey” perspectives. In a route perspective, an individual will address the listener as “you” then take “you” on a tour of an environment describing landmarks in terms of the listener’s front, back, left, and right, employing mental transformation to understand location in terms of self. With the survey perspective, the individual will orient the listener by employing a bird’s-eye view of an environment describing landmarks as being north, south, east, and west. In both situations, mental transformation is employed to understand location in terms of mental scanning of an object.

Imagery and Perception. Spatial representations support learning in reading, mathematics, and science. The ubiquitous properties of perception, such as depth perception, enable students to apply the qualities of a notable object to thinking with imagery. Gestalt psychologists have classified different forms of visual information into types, which are processed in different parts of the brain: color, motion, shape, location, juxtaposition, and brightness. Imagery represents perceptual experience and inherits perceptual experience that goes beyond fundamental linguistics within cognitive thinking. This makes them significant in education because when employed they make learning seem effortless. In learning, spatial representations have been shown to impact memory in regards to retaining verbal information and understanding its meaning.

Humans can create images from visual information acquired by touch, sound, and language (Shelton & McNamara, 2001). Sensation provides spatial information through sight, smell, sound, and touch. When these senses provide a cohesive, stable experience, or an effortless structure, they allow for action that is reliable for cause and effect study. Important to learning is the recognition that at any given moment, an individual can see only one set of structures due to limits on human vision.

Conversely, perception guides action; humans are always recalibrating with perceptual motor skills that involve minimal thinking effort. Human motor skills couple perception and action. For example, individuals will move their heads to get a better look at something. Musicians are trained to read musical notation, their eyes taking in the language of musical notes on the page and transmitting the meaning of the symbols to hands and fingers that move upon a keyboard to produce music.

Further Insights

Humans utilize visual-spatial abilities everyday to thrive in complex environments. People navigate, estimate distance, and measure height and width to perform various tasks. Spatial abilities are necessary in fields such as sports, mathematics, natural sciences, engineering, making forecasts and projections in meteorology, and working in chemistry and physics. Abstract premises come out of spatial reasoning that are needed to construct efficient mental models from verbal descriptions.

Spatial ability serves an important role in advancing science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). Studies have found a correlation between the high level of spatial abilities and the probability of getting an advanced degree in STEM fields. New technologies, including imaging, computer graphics, data visualization, and supercomputing, as well as object configuration from several screens utilizing multiple perspectives, as with surgical practices, are all dependent on spatial reasoning.

Developing spatial skills is important to help students make sense of things they may not have experienced firsthand. In STEM education, imagery can help students to infer structures hidden from ordinary perception or to perceive likely outcomes that go beyond experience. When individuals learn calculus, for example, they must employ linguistic, mathematical, and spatial abilities. Evidence exists that spatial visualization is developed with experience.

Pre-interpretive images allow individuals to manipulate images to view and review what forms emerge. Participants in a 1975 study were shown nonsensical doodle drawings, sometimes with and sometimes without descriptive captions; those shown images with captions were better able to recall and reproduce the doodles.

Literacy and Visual Literacy. The translation of sounds into letters and new visible symbolic objects radically altered the human consciousness. Words could be read repeatedly and when individuals became literate, they could build upon recorded knowledge and advance thinking. Literacy is also tied to self-identity. Words on a page often create vivid pictures in the mind. Books serve as vessels for human agency in constructing identity, idealized lives, biographies, chronicles of group activities, and manifestations of collective and individual historic memory. The ability to read provides a sense of self-worth, opening up the world of new ideas.

While literacy is the ability to derive meaning from symbols (by combining letters into words), visual literacy is the ability to derive sense and meaning from images. Proportion, for example, can be understood from a bar graph or pie chart. Spatial reasoning is studied within the context of graphics, maps, diagrams, graphs, and charts where medium is part of the message in working with memory.

When Aldus Manutius (1449-1515) began to mass-produce pocket-sized texts in 1502, this technology allowed humans to easily transport and share ideas. Benedetto Bordone (circa 1455/60-1530), for example, was celebrated for his descriptions of islands around the world—islands his typical reader would never have seen—in his book Isolario (1528), which included excellent double-page woodcut maps and an oval projection of the “Map of the World.” The maps allowed Bordone’s readers to better envision the islands (and the face of the world), providing information such as shape and size visually.

Spatial skills do not work insolation from other abilities. In visuospatial reasoning, distortions elucidate the processes involved with constructing and utilizing mental representations by showing their consequences. Individuals are required to make inferences mentally from information that is external.

In the 1840s, Friedrich Froebel’s innovation in education—the kindergarten—taught children skills with simple “gifts,” including blocks, string, and paper. “Paperwork” involved cutting and pasting paper scraps into geometric shapes and origami, or paper folding. Concepts of transformation and rotation were thus established with tactile exercises.

Discourse

Individuals vary in their spatial abilities. Visually impaired individuals, for example, are not found to be disadvantaged with spatial tasks. Logical reasoning, effective memory retrieval, and verbal skill can compensate for deficits in any area of spatial skills. Individuals make inferences about motion and speed even as they walk near branches of trees that sway in a breeze or select a short-cut to a favorite cafe.

As Panachev (2016) points out, considerable research finds a strong association between student academic performance and physical activity, such as being involved in team sports. Spatial ability is increased in tandem with physical coordination as developed in classical dance and shooting exercises. Nevertheless, in the United States, students by and large have difficulty with STEM subject areas, and while the connection between participation in sports and school performance seems strong, a direct link to aptitude has not been firmly established. Other factors, such as self-discipline and motivation may explain some of the apparent correlation with better grades. Several studies, however, have found that students with strong spatial ability are less likely to struggle with STEM subjects (Stieff & Uttal, 2015).

Widespread agreement exists that spatial abilities can be improved with training. Videogames, though a source of concern as a contributing factor to low physical activity and obesity, do provide intensive training in spatial abilities. Few programs for schools, however, have been developed to help students increase spatial reasoning. Paper folding has gained popularity as a classroom exercise, harking back to Froebel’s paper lessons. Early evidence on the efficacy of training on struggling STEM students appears modestly promising but suggests the effect is likely to be small in older students. In fact, the window of opportunity for using spatial ability training to set an appropriate foundation for science, engineering, and math instruction may be with or before the introduction of STEM subjects (Stieff & Uttal, 2015).

The puzzling predominance of men in STEM fields has variously been explained as the result of upbringing, biased education, and simple hostility toward women entering male territory. While gender discrimination in STEM is well documented, girls are proportionately less interested in STEM fields. Researchers, in fact, find differences in spatial abilities that appear to be tied to gender. According to Harris, Newcombe, and Hirsh-Pasek (2013), children are able to engage in mental folding at around age five. Mental folding, the ability to imagine how a piece of paper would appear folded in certain ways, is a particularly difficult spatial ability, which does not appear to reveal a gender advantage. Several studies, however, have found that males typically have a significant advantage over females when tested in mental rotation, the ability to recognize a shape from different angles, for example, a triangle turned upside down. In one study of more than eight hundred STEM and non-STEM college students, conducted from 1998 to 2004, STEM students, predictably, outperformed non-STEM students in mental rotation; men outperformed women, even within the STEM group, though the STEM women did outperform the non-STEM men (Sharobeam, 2016). Yeo and colleagues (2016), using structural MRI scans reported sex-related differences in the brains of men and women that predicted spatial ability.

Terms & Concepts

Gestalt: A school of psychology that asserts that phenomena are perceived as relating to a whole rather than as the sum of their parts. It is a new structure created through psychological closer, where a form, configuration, or shape is not simply the sum of its parts, but it also consumes its elements into a larger whole.

Imagery: The perceptual-motor process of working with mental spatial representations blending linguistic, conceptual, and logical perceptual perceptions and experiences.

Mental Folding: Complex spatial visualization involving the folding of a two-dimensional pattern or material into 3D objects produced by manipulating objects in a way that changes them, as with paper folding skills such as origami.

Mental Rotation: The mental ability to manipulate and rotate 2D or 3D objects in space quickly and accurately.

Representations: Internal translations of external stimuli (or data) that capture visuospatial properties of the world.

Spatial Perception: The ability to perceive spatial relationships in respect to the orientation of one’s body despite distracting information.

Spatial Visualization: Complicated multi-step manipulations of spatially presented information.

Bibliography

Ferguson, A. A., Maloney, E. A., Fugelsang, J., & Risko, E. F. (2015). On the relation between math and spatial ability: The case of math anxiety. Learning & Individual Differences, 39, 1–12. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=102496603&site=ehost-live

Haciomeroglu, E. E. (2016). Object-spatial visualization and verbal cognitive styles, and their relation to cognitive abilities and mathematical performance. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, 16(3), 987–1003. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116693059&site=ehost-live

Harris, J., Newcombe, N. S., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2013). A new twist on studying the development of dynamic spatial transformations: Mental paper folding in young children. Mind, Brain & Education, 7(1), 49–55. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=85713685&site=ehost-live

Jeng, H. J., & Liu, G. B. (2016). Test interactivity is promising in promoting gender equity in females’ pursuit of STEM careers. Learning & Individual Differences, 49, 201–208. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=117059718&site=ehost-live

Moè, A. A. (2016). Does experience with spatial school subjects favour girls’ mental rotation performance? Learning & Individual Differences, 47, 11–16. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=115218656&site=ehost-live

Panachev, V. P. (2016). Innovative problems of improving the quality of life of the welfare state. International Journal of Environmental & Science Education, 11(12), 5164–5170. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118442058&site=ehost-live

Sharobeam, M. M. (2016). The variation in spatial visualization abilities of college male and female students in STEM fields versus non-STEM fields. Journal of College Science Teaching, 46(2), 93–99. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=119137078&site=ehost-live

Stieff, M. M., & Uttal, D. (2015). How much can spatial training improve STEM achievement? Educational Psychology Review, 27(4), 607–615. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=111242181&site=ehost-live

Tezer, M., Cumhur, M., & Hürsen, E. (2016). Reasoning states of children who play a musical instrument, regarding the mathematics lesson: Teachers’ views. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science & Technology Education, 12(6), 1487–1498. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=114472553&site=ehost-live

Yeo, R. R., Ryman, S. G., Thompson, M. E., van den Heuvel, M. P., de Reus, M. A., Pommy, J., & ... Jung, R. E. (2016). Cognitive specialization for verbal vs. spatial ability in men and women: Neural and behavioral correlates. Personality & Individual Differences, 102, 60–67. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=117588368&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Fessakis, G., Bekri, A., & Konstantopoulou, A. (2016). Designing a mobile game for spatial and map abilities of kindergarten children. Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning, 1, 183–191. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118259917&site=ehost-live

Johannes, K. J., Wilson, C., & Landau, B. (2016). The importance of lexical verbs in the acquisition of spatial prepositions: The case of in and on. Cognition, 157, 174–189. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=119156031&site=ehost-live

Münzer, S. S. (2015). Facilitating recognition of spatial structures through animation and the role of mental rotation ability. Learning & Individual Differences, 38, 76–82. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=101935741&site=ehost-live

Yurt, E. E., & Tünkler, V. V. (2016). A study on the spatial abilities of prospective social studies teachers: A mixed method research. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, 16(3), 965–986. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116693058&site=ehost-live