SPATIAL VISUALIZATION AND THE ROLE OF WORKING MEMORY

The talk will present two general lines of research on improving spatial thinking in the context of Geoscience education. Much attention has focused on using education to impart specific knowledge or skills, however, recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that it is possible to develop domain-general cognitive resources, such as working memory, with targeted training. Recent work from the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center indicates that working memory is important for 3D spatial reasoning, and that training spatial working memory yields similar if not larger gains than direct spatial visualization training.

Our second approach has been to identify specific spatial skills possessed by experts and try to characterize the underlying cognitive processes. For example, in many areas of the geosciences experts visualize transformations. To further our understanding of the mental animation involved in visualizing transformations we have studied experts’ abilities to reverse structural transformations such as faults in non-geological stimuli. We find that geoscience experts can mentally reverse a series of faults to identify a word that had been faulted multiple times with cross cutting faults. Initial findings suggest that this ability is not restricted to geologically plausible transformations, but may support a general ability to mentally simulate spatial changes.

These findings come from a larger project to identify spatial skills within a context of a newly developed structure for spatial thinking that identifies psychologically and neurobiologically important dimensions of spatial thinking: dynamic vs. static spatial relations and within object vs. between object relations. Approaches to training specific skills and the domain general cognitive resources that support them will be discussed.