Research On The Development Of Preschool Children's Mental Rotation

Mental rotation is a mental process, which mentally rotate one image in two dimensions or in three dimensions. The ability of mental rotation is not only an important part of spatial ability, but also a significant component of intelligence. The study on mental rotation is a frequently-discussed subject in psychology as well as in preschool education.The paper reviewed previous experiments, finding that there are some differences in the experiment materials. Accordingly, it assumes that the differences of experiment materials lead to differences of mental rotation. Based on previous experiments, we take more materials as the stimulus in the experiment in order to find the developmental characteristics of children in mental rotation.We take a 3*3*2 design, using pictures, abstract figures and geometrical figures as the stimulus. The methods of oral report and an intelligence test are also be used to explore mental rotation of children from 3 to 6 years old.To summarize, across the experiment, we present three conclusions as follows: Children begin to rotate an object mentally when they are four years old. Maybe it is a critical period for the development of mental rotation. In this experiment we can not find the sex differences in mental rotation. But we find that different materials can lead to different results. We can get the highest score when the stimulus is picture and we can get the lowest score when the stimulus is geometrical figure. The score resulting from the abstract figure is between the other two types of figures. Children aged 4 to 6 can take the strategy of mental rotation to finish the task, while the children younger than 4 can not take the strategy to do that.The study provides some suggestions to preschool education: we should value children's ability of mental rotation; take emphasis on individual differences and culture differences in preschool education; pay attention to the effect of action in early childhood; set up appropriate curriculum to develop children's related cognitive abilities.