| Spatial cognition is one of the basic components of human intelligence,playing a relatively independent role in the intellectual structure.Visual spatial representation is the basic operation for spatial cognitive ability to solve problems,while mental rotation test,which is a typical experimental paradigm for the study of spatial representation,provides a quantitative and objective method to comprehend spatial cognition.As researchers have become more inclined to study human intelligence from the perspective of information processing,numbers of studies have found that mental rotation,as one of the basic operations of human spatial ability,has advantages to predict subjects' spatial ability.Therefore,our study takes the mental rotation test as the research paradigm,and analyzes the spatial cognitive processing mechanism in detail.The purpose of our study is to decompose the mental rotation task,summarize the relationship between different processing steps and different strategies of mental rotation,reveal the effects from different components of visual working memory on the mental rotation process,and finally enhance the understanding of the mechanism of human spatial cognition.Besides the analysis of behavioral data,the EEG signal analysis is another primary tool in our study.First,the EEG data were analyzed by event-related potential(ERP),which has the advantage of high temporal resolution.Then,time-frequency analysis was taken to assess the feature of synchronization by calculating the event-related spectral perturbation(ERSP),the inter-trail coherence(ITC).Finally the standard low-resolution electromagnetic tomography(s LORETA)was used to analyze the current density of EEG data.The main content and conclusions of our study are as follows:By studying the differences in the behavioral characteristics of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional mental rotation,we found that:(1)The spatial representation of the three-dimensional mental rotation process is more difficult,which results in longer response time to reach the target orientation and more ambiguous differences between orientations;(2)"FLIP" is more likely to take place in the two-dimensional mental rotation cognitive process than the three-dimensional mental rotation,and the participation of the out-of-plane rotation process leads to more obvious version effect in the two-dimensional mental rotation test;(3)The two-dimensional mental rotation process is more susceptible to non-rotation process,and the greater the angle of the experimental material,the larger proportion of mental rotation process;(4)Compared with the linear model,the nonlinear model can be more suitable to identify the discrepancy between different experiments or different material types;(5)Compared with the traditional linear and nonlinear model,the decision model of linear ballistic accumulator includes more prameters which represents abundant potential information.Meanwhile,the LBA model prefers the behavioural data from the two-dimensional mental rotation test and the normal version of materials.By studying the behavioral data and EEG data in the late phase of two-dimensional mental rotation test,we found that:(1)The phenomenon of "FLIP" does exist in the mental rotation process corresponding to the mirror image;(2)The out-of-plane rotation is likely to occur after the in-plane rotation,and overlap with both the in-plane rotation and the decision-making processes(3)With the increase of the angle of the experimental material,there are parallel trends in the in-plane and the out-of-plane rotation process;(4)Multiple cognitive processes have a significant interaction in the late phase of mental rotation.As a result,studying the version effect in the late phase has the advantage of making a more direct comparison of the in-plane and out-of-plane rotation than the early phase.A detailed analysis of the version effect in the late phase will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the flip effect in the mirror version of stimuli.By studying the effects from different components of visual working memory on the characteristics of mental rotation,we found that:(1)The differences between the mean amplitude of ERP and the degree of desynchronization of ?-band and ?-band proved that the object working memory has a greater influence on mental rotation process than the spatial working memory,which confirms the dissociation of visual working memory again;(2)Although the working memory load,especially the object working memory load,has a significant effect on the characteristics of ERP and ERSP in the mental rotation process,the influence gradually disappears with the increase of orientation which stands for the difficulty of the mental rotation test.Therefore,the working memory is more likely to have an effect on the formation and storage of the spatial representation,rather than the operation of the spatial representation,that is,the object memory load does not affect the core characteristics of mental rotation process,the object working memory ability in the mental rotation process has played a supporting role.By performing a standardization examination on the design of out portable cognitive ability test,we found that:(1)The software has the characteristics of relatively complete system,high expansibility and automatic data collection;(2)Although some cognitive tests in our software needs to work on,the overall framework succeeds to meet the internal consistency requirements,and exerts qualified structural validity and criterion-related validity.At the same time,the software achieves the standard stability and accuracy of cognitive tests and reflects the common cognitive factor in line with the theory of intellectual factors;(3)The software as the application of our research can collect and analyze massive data in the modern network society,which can be used as a cognitive database to predict subjects' performance,or for the field of capacity assessment and talent selectionIn our research,we anaylzed the behavioral data and EEG data of mental rotation tests under different conditions,which has been proved to play an important role in studying the operation of spatial representation and predicting subjects‘s spatial cognition.Through analyzing the differences between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional mental rotation process,and the differences between normal and mirror images,and the difference of the early and late phase of mental rotation process and the effects from different components of the visual working memory,we inspected series stages of mental rotation process and expounded the possible role of the working memory components in the mental rotation task.In the meanwhile,we made reliable reasoning on the different processing strategies and mechanism of the mental rotation.In summary,our study carried out a meaningful exploration on the mechnisms of human spatial cognition. |
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