Inferring Cross-Sections: When Internal Visualizations Are More Important Than Properties of External Visualizations

Abstract

Three experiments examined how cognitive abilities and qualities of external visualizations affected performance of a mental visualization task; inferring the cross-section of a complex three-dimensional object. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of animations designed to provide different task-relevant views of the external object. Experiment 2 examined the effects of both stereoscopic and motion-based depth cues. Experiment 3 examined the effects of interactive animations, with and without stereoscopic viewing conditions. In all experiments, spatial and general reasoning abilities were measured. Effects of animation, stereopsis, and interactivity were relatively small and did not reach statistical significance. In contrast, spatial ability was significantly associated with superior performance in all experiments, and this remained true after controlling for general intelligence. The results indicate that difficulties in this task stem more from the cognitive ability to perform the relevant internal spatial transformations, than limited visual information about the three-dimensional structure of the object.

Notes

¹One of these items showed a horizontal section through the top of the tooth, where there was no internal (nerve) structure, and in the other item, the line showing the section obscured the nerve structure so that it was ambiguous.

²Due to experimenter error, response time data were not collected for one participant.

Background. This article is based on the master's thesis of the first author.

Acknowledgments. We thank Jerry Tietz for development support and technical advice, Rachel Avanessian who helped conduct Experiment 2, and Jack Loomis and Dan Montello for comments on previous versions of this article.

Support. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant 0313237. Peter Khooshabeh performed this research while on appointment as a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Fellow under DOE contract number DE-AC05-00OR22750.

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received July 7, 2008. Revision received April 24, 2009. Accepted by Sharon Oviatt. Final manuscript received November 6, 2009.—Editor