We present a new spatial skills assessment tool, the Virtual Reality Mental Rotation Assessment. Results suggest that the gamified immersive experience enabled increased levels of engagement and motivation and the instrument was likely not biased in favor or people with past virtual reality (VR) experience. Using VR did not appear to introduce additional problems beyond those present in a traditional spatial test, as moving one's body to change perspective did not correlate with improved performance. Our findings have implications for training and assessing spatial skills in engineering.

Virtual reality (VR) sketching has many advantages for product design and tends to be more and more used among designers and non-designers (end-users). Nevertheless, few studies have focused on the skills needed to use VR sketching for non-designers especially VR novices in VR software. This study focuses on identifying the cognitive impact of VR sketching compared to traditional sketching on VR expert and VR novice in an experimental setting. Thirty-one participants composed of VR experts (N = 15) and VR novices (N = 16) completed a mental rotation test and then performed one traditional paper and pencil sketching task and two VR sketching tasks. We also measured the participants’ movements when using the VR sketching. Results show that VR experts perform better than VR novices in VR sketching because training is an essential element for the quality of traditional and VR sketching. Nevertheless, VR novices with previous training in traditional drawing and/or high mental rotation skills will be able to produce good-quality sketches. In addition, the results show that users moving more in the immersive environment performed better quality sketches if the drawing requires more complex shapes. Our results suggest that VR sketching can be complex to use for a part of the population that may be end-users, especially for those with little experience in traditional and VR sketching and with poor visuospatial abilities. We, therefore, advise to check the non-designers’ prior skills, otherwise, it will be necessary to train these users in VR sketching.

Despite the existence of numerous studies that examined the relationship between working memory capacity and performance in complex cognitive tasks, it remains unclear whether this capacity is domain specific or domain general. In addition, the available empirical evidence is somewhat contradictory. In this work we have studied the role of verbal working memory capacity in a non-verbal task – mental image rotation. If this capacity were domain specific it would be expected that high and low verbal span participants would obtain similar results in the mental rotation task. We have found that this is not the case as the high span participants performed better in terms of both speed and accuracy. Moreover, these differences depended on the processing component of the mental rotation task: the higher the processing requirements the higher the differences as a function of the working memory capacity. Therefore, the evidence presented here supports the domain general hypothesis.

Sex differences in mental rotation ability have been observed in many countries. A previous study of Finnish participants reported that genetic and environmental influences on mental rotation ability differ between sexes. In this study, we assessed genetic and environmental influences on variance in mental rotation ability in 649 Japanese twins using a mental rotation test. To explain the influence of sex on variance in mental rotation ability, we applied genetic analysis using the sex limitation model. The following two factors explained variance in mental rotation ability: (1) the additive genetic factor, which reflects the accumulated small influence of many genes, and (2) the unique environmental factor, which is a type of environmental factor that differs between co-twins. The shared environmental factor, a type of environmental factor common for co-twins, could not explain the variance in mental rotation ability. Furthermore, the additive genetic factor was the same between sexes (i.e., not qualitative sex differences for the additive genetic factor), indicating that the same genes affect mental rotation ability in both sexes. Despite this observation, the additive genetic influence was greater in males than in females. In contrast, the unique environmental influence was not different between sexes. Considering the current results and those of a previous study, the quantitative sex difference for the additive genetic influences in mental rotation ability may be universal, while the unique environmental differences may depend on the characteristics of specific populations.

Several lines of evidence suggest that mental motor imagery is subserved by the same cognitive operations and brain structures that underlie action. Additionally, motor imagery is informed by the anticipated sensory consequences of action, including pain. We reasoned that motor imagery could provide a useful measure of chronic leg or foot pain. Forty subjects with leg pain (19 bilateral, 11 right, and 10 left leg pain), 42 subjects with chronic pain not involving the legs, and 38 controls were shown 12 different line drawings of the right or left foot and asked to indicate which foot was depicted. Previous work suggests that subjects perform this task by mentally rotating their foot to match the visually presented stimulus. All groups of subjects were slower and less accurate with stimuli that required a greater degree of mental rotation of their foot. Subjects with leg pain were both slower and less accurate than normal and pain control subjects in responding to drawings of a painful extremity. Furthermore, subjects with leg pain exhibited a significantly greater decrement in performance for stimuli that required larger amplitude mental rotations. These data suggest that motor imagery may provide important insights into the nature of the pain experience. (JINS, 2010, 16, 603–612.)

We compared motor imagery performance of normally limbed individuals with that of individuals with one or both hands missing since birth (i.e., hand amelia). To this aim, 14 unilaterally and 2 bilaterally amelic participants performed a task requiring the classification of hands depicted in different degrees of rotation as either a left or a right hand. On the same task, 24 normally limbed participants recapitulated previously reported effects; that is, that the hand motor dominance and, more generally, a lifelong use of hands are important determinants of left–right decisions. Unilaterally amelic participants responded slower to hands corresponding to their absent, compared with their existing, hand. Moreover, left and right hand amelic participants showed prolonged reaction times to hands (whether left or right) depicted in unnatural orientations compared with natural orientations. Among the bilateral amelics, the individual with phantom sensations, but not the one without, showed similar differentiation. These findings demonstrate that the visual recognition of a hand never physically developed is prolonged, but still modulated by different rotation angles. They are further compatible with the view that phantom limbs in hand amelia may constrain motor imagery as much as do amputation phantoms. (JINS, 2008, 14, 81–89.)

The ability to spatially rotate a mental image was compared in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD; n = 18) and patients with Huntington's disease (HD; n = 18). Compared to their respective age-matched normal control (NC) group, the speed, but not the accuracy, of mental rotation abnormally decreased with increasing angle of orientation for patients with HD. In contrast, the accuracy, but not the speed, of rotation abnormally decreased with increasing angle of orientation for patients with AD. Additional analyses showed that these unique patterns of performance were not attributable to different speed/accuracy trade-off sensitivities. This double dissociation suggests that the distinct brain regions affected in the two diseases differentially contribute to speed and accuracy of mental rotation. Specifically, the slowing exhibited by HD patients may be mediated by damage to the basal ganglia, whereas the spatial manipulation deficit of AD patients may reflect pathology in parietal and temporal lobe association cortices important for visuospatial processing. (JINS, 2005, 11, 30–39.)

Deficits in visual-spatial ability can be associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), and there are several possible reasons for these deficits. Dysfunction in frontal–striatal and/or frontal–parietal systems, associated with dopamine deficiency, might disrupt cognitive processes either supporting (e.g., working memory) or subserving visual-spatial computations. The goal of this study was to assess visual–spatial orientation ability in individuals with PD using the Mental Rotations Test (MRT), along with other measures of cognitive function. Non-demented men with PD were significantly less accurate on this test than matched control men. In contrast, women with PD performed similarly to matched control women, but both groups of women did not perform much better than chance. Further, mental rotation accuracy in men correlated with their executive skills involving mental processing and psychomotor speed. In women with PD, however, mental rotation accuracy correlated negatively with verbal memory, indicating that higher mental rotation performance was associated with lower ability in verbal memory. These results indicate that PD is associated with visual–spatial orientation deficits in men. Women with PD and control women both performed poorly on the MRT, possibly reflecting a floor effect. Although men and women with PD appear to engage different cognitive processes in this task, the reason for the sex difference remains to be elucidated. (JINS, 2003, 9, 1078–1087.)

The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe – provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three-dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is canceled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily-shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum-entropy priors.

In a parity judgment task, the ERPs at parietal electrode sites become more negative as more mental rotation has to be executed. This article provides a review of the empirical evidence regarding this amplitude modulation. More specifically, experiments are reported that validate both the functional relationship between mental rotation and the amplitude modulation as well as the temporal relationship both in single- and in dual-task situations. Additionally, ERP effects are reported in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm with mental rotation as the second task. Finally, unresolved issues are discussed that, I hope, might stimulate future research.

In a parity judgment task, the ERPs at parietal electrode sites become the more negative the more mental rotation has to be executed. In two experiments, it was investigated whether a temporal relationship exists between the onset of this amplitude modulation and the moment when mental rotation is executed. Therefore, the duration of processing stages located before mental rotation was manipulated. The amplitude modulation was delayed when either the perceptual quality of the stimulus was reduced (Experiment 1) or when character discrimination was more difficult (Experiment 2). The results suggest that the onset of the rotation-related negativity might be used as a chronopsychophysiological marker for the onset of the cognitive process of mental rotation.

We investigated the nature of event-related potential (ERP) effects in a handedness recognition task requiring mental rotation. Thirty subjects were tested with rotated and sometimes reflected alphanumeric characters while ERPs were recorded from 18 electrodes. On each trial, a cue provided valid information about the angular displacement of the following probe. This design allowed a distinction between three processing episodes: evaluation of the difficulty of the forthcoming task, preparation for the task, and the mental rotation task itself. The three episodes were accompanied by distinct ERP effects having distinct polarities, a different rank order of amplitudes for different probe orientations, and a different topography. These data confirm previous findings showing that mental rotation is accompanied by a parietal negativity. However, they also suggest that the rotation-related negativity found after tilted stimuli in standard mental rotation tasks is most likely overlapping with another, simultaneously triggered ERP effect functionally related to an evaluation of task difficulty.

Twelve right-handed men participated in two mental rotation tasks as their regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was monitored using positron emission tomography. In one task, participants mentally rotated and compared figures composed of angular branching forms; in the other task, participants mentally rotated and compared drawings of human hands. In both cases, rCBF was compared with a baseline condition that used identical stimuli and required the same comparison, but in which rotation was not required. Mental rotation of branching objects engendered activation in the parietal lobe and Area 19. In contrast, mental rotation of hands engendered activation in the precentral gyrus (M1), superior and inferior parietal lobes, primary visual cortex, insula, and frontal Areas 6 and 9. The results suggest that at least two different mechanisms can be used in mental rotation, one mechanism that recruits processes that prepare motor movements and another mechanism that does not.