A Comparative Study Of Mental Rotation Ability Of A Novice And An Expert In Orienteering

Orienteering is a sport which entails good spatial ability and the ability to analyse space.Participants use these abilities to do mental rotation and motor imagery in a specific environment.It includes the mental rotation of reference objects and egos when participants rotate maps and match real locations.In object-based mental rotation,participants take a reference object as the core,favoring to use a third-person perspective to witness the rotation.In egocentric mental rotation,participants take themselves as the core,favoring to use a first-person perspective to do motor imagery.This study includes an object-based mental rotation task and an egocentric mental rotation one,which are designed according to different references,to explore the difference between a novice's and an expert's mental rotation ability in orienteering.In the first experiment,pictures with the letter "R" on them and body images are utilized as stimuli in the object-based mental rotation task.This experiment is to explore the difference between a novice's and an expert's performance in such a task.In the second experiment,body images in the first experiment are taken as stimuli.This one is to explore a novice's egocentric mental rotation ability.By the embodied cognition theory,it is reasonable to speculate that body-related stimuli can cause subjects'egocentric ro'tation.In an egocentric rotation task,the manipulation of subjects,body position is the most direct way to explore the embodied cognition theory.The so-called cognition is from the interaction of the body and the environment.Therefore,in the egocentric mental rotation task,the subjects' body positions are manipulated in different contexts,to explore how differently body positions will influence the subjects' reaction.The first experiment proves that,(1)compared with the orienteering novices,the experts have shorter reaction time and higher accuracy,and this is in accord with previous studies.(2)However,the body images may have made the subjects confused about whether to take themselves or the body images as the rotation reference.This is because some body-related stimuli(the body images)have promoted the subjects to do egocentric mental rotation.The second experiment proves that,(1)in the egocentric mental rotation task,the experts and the novices both have higher accuracy and shorter reaction time,(2)and the body-related stimuli have indeed caused the subjects' egocentric mental rotation.(3)The manipulation of body positions has produced different effects on the bodies of the novices and the experts.When the body position on the body image is in accord with the subjects' position,with their body position manipulated,both of the experts and the novices have higher accuracy and shorter reaction time than in the situation where there is no body position manipulation.When the body position on the body image is not in accord with the subjects'position,with their body position manipulated,the novices have longer reaction time and lower accuracy than in the situation where there is no body position manipulation.But whether to manipulate the body position or not does no difference to the experts in their reaction time and accuracy.This study proves that,(1)an orienteering expert performs noticeably better than a novice in egocentric and object-based mental rotation.(3)The body position has an influence on the mental rotation ability and there are effects on participants' body in egocentric mental rotation.4)By the embodied cognition theory,it is reasonable to say that it is an embodied practice by which an orienteering novice grows up into an expert.