The Research On Mental Rotation Of Students With Visual Impairments And Its Trainability

Mental rotation was an important component of spatial ability. Improving the ability of mental rotation was connected to the enhancing of Orientation&Mobility(O&M), daily living skills, and school achievements for the students with visual impairments(â…¥). This research focused on the mental rotation of students with â…¥ about the common status, development characteristics, related factors and the effect of training. The characters of mental rotation of the students with â…¥ had been discussed, including the general features and individual differences.Interview and experiment were used to find the status and trainability of the mental rotation of students with â…¥. All of the85subjects were older than11, under stage of compulsory education, and came from the Zhejiang Province School for Blind Children. The main conclusions were as follows.The research for the status of mental rotation of students with â…¥ found that:(1)the students with â…¥ could perform mental rotation tasks, but the speed and the accuracy were lower than individuals without â…¥;(2) diverse characters of the mental rotation tasks means different difficulties;(3) differences between individuals exist among students with â…¥, and they would be decreased with the increase of education;(4)higher ability of mental rotation for students with â…¥ was related to higher ability of O&M and more participation in group ball activities;(5) students without usable vision who had been trained for musical instruments performed better on mental rotation than who had not; and students with usable vision who had been trained for manipulation performed better than who had not.The research for the trainability of the mental rotation of students with â…¥ found that:(1) the ability of mental rotation of students with â…¥ could be improved by training; the students without usable vision was benefited more from a large number practice with feedbacks;(2) the range of improvements of mental rotation performance was connected to the difficulty of mental rotation task and the original mental rotation performance level of subjects, which means the effects of training were more on the items in which one picture was mirror image of another than the items in which two pictures were same after rotation, and for the subjects who had lower level original ability of mental rotation than who had higher level.Based on these founds, some suggestions were discussed which were about improving the ability of mental rotation and related skills for students with VI. Some important questions which needed more attention were also pointed out.