Individual Differences In Learning Effects Of High And Low Spatial Ability

Spatial ability generally refers to symbolic nonverbal information ability that people generate spatial information,represent and transform spatial information,and extract spatial information.There are significant individual differences in spatial ability between us.Few studies have explored how to eliminate the differences between them,mostly for two-dimensional mental rotation tasks,and less close to real life scenes.It has been proved that learning can improve individual's ability,especially was confirmed by a large number of verbal or written materials,studies have shown that repeated learning and complete tasks will improve the subject's response performance in the route learning.Therefore,this study will explore whether individuals with different spatial abilities can achieve the same level of understanding of the spatial environment by short-term repeated learning with the virtual reality technique.In addition,most of the researches in large scenes are mostly one-way walking,but in real life,we always go back and forth between the two places.Therefore,we will explore whether the process of unidirectional route learning and bidirectional route learning will have an impact on individual task performance.The study used Santa Barbara direction questionnaire to select participants into different groups.Experiment one has 41 participants and adopts one direction learning method,experiment two adopts bidirectional route learning method with 32 participants.Experiments use the same procedure and tasks,The results show that,through short-term learning,the differences between the high and low spatial abilities are eliminated to a certain extent,and the effect is more significant on the complex path.Individual test tasks with one direction learning method are better than those of bidirectional learning.The results of the study may have a great value to the spatial ability training.