Brandon Eich² (), Tom Tomshe¹, Raevan Hanan¹, Chloe Kindell¹, Hanane Ramzaoui¹, Heather Lucas¹, Melissa Beck¹; ¹Louisiana State University, ²University of Arizona

Mental rotation is a spatial reasoning skill that is predictive of general intelligence, creativity, and STEM performance. In a common mental rotation task, two images from different angles are viewed side by side and are either identical (same trial) or mirrored versions of each other (different trial). Typically, there is a linear increase in response time (RT) as the angle of disparity (AoD) increases between stimuli. This increase in RT is thought to represent a strategy of using mental imagery to rotate, like the physical action of rotating, one of the images to see if it can match the other, with this process taking longer the larger the AoD between stimuli. However, there are other more analytic strategies that may be used as well. The mental rotation strategy used between trials with small versus large AoDs was examined in a large sample of undergraduate-student participants while their eye-movements were tracked. Results suggest that for smaller AoDs (20°, 40°, & 60°), RT increased as AoD increased, suggesting that rotation of visual imagery strategies were used. However, for larger AoDs (120°, 140°, & 160°), RTs plateaued and did not increase, suggesting a different strategy was used. Consistently, the number of fixations and saccade amplitude within an object, and the number of gaze changes between objects increased as angular disparity increased (i.e., from 20° to 60°), but then plateaus at larger AoDs. Together, these results suggest that at smaller AoDs a strategy of mentally rotating stimuli was used, while at larger AoDs, a piecemeal strategy was used, where parts of the object were used for comparison. This difference in strategy led to an increase in RT and decrease in accuracy up until the larger AoDs, where participants made similar eye-movements across the larger AoDs and produced similar RTs and accuracy.

Acknowledgements: This project was supported by an NSF grant (AM230273) titled Enhancing STEM Success: A Multi-modal Investigating of Spatial Reasoning and Training in Undergraduate Education