Uncovering the cognitive processes underlying mental rotation: an eye-movement study

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Spatial Cognition

Background:

• Mental rotation is a key aspect of spatial ability.
• Previous research suggests mental rotation involves sequential cognitive states, but experimental evidence is lacking.
• Understanding these states is crucial for cognitive modeling.

Purpose of the Study:

• To experimentally investigate the sequential cognitive-processing states during mental rotation tasks.
• To determine if eye movements can differentiate between mental rotation strategies.
• To model the discrete stages of mental rotation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized eye-movement data from participants performing two distinct mental rotation strategies.
• Employed a discriminative hidden Markov model (dHMM) for data-driven inference of cognitive states.
• Compared dHMM performance against logistic regression and support vector machine models.

Main Results:

• Eye movements provided sufficient information to identify distinct processing strategies.
• The dHMM successfully segmented the mental rotation process into three hidden states: encoding and searching, comparison, and searching on one-side pair.
• The dHMM achieved the highest accuracy (76.8%) in predicting mental rotation strategies compared to other methods.
• Significant differences in processing states were observed between the two tested strategies.

Conclusions:

• Mental rotation is a discrete cognitive process, executed in a piecemeal fashion.
• The identified hidden states provide empirical support for sequential processing in mental rotation.
• The findings validate the use of dHMM and eye-tracking for analyzing cognitive processes.