Geography education improves spatial ability: evidence from fMRI and behavioral experiments

ABSTRACT

Previous behavior experimental studies indicate that geography education facilitates the development of students’ spatial ability. However, it is unclear how geography education shapes student brain activity and promotes spatial ability. In this article, we proposed a neuroscience-based method to explore the relationship between geography education and spatial ability. We conducted a behavioral experiment with 63 participants and an fMRI experiment with 49 participants. All the participants were divided into groups according to their undergraduate years and majors completed four spatial ability tasks. The fMRI and behavioral results revealed that after four years of geography education, students had greater mental rotation, spatial visualization and spatial relation reasoning abilities than non-geography students. The activation and functional connectivity of brain regions further indicated that geography education improved students’ spatial reference, spatial memory, visual attention and spatial decision-making. Our findings offer new neuroscience evidence that geography education can improve the spatial ability of undergraduate students, and provide new neuroimaging approach for geographic talent cultivation and curriculum assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial ability
• geography education
• behavioral experiment
• functional magnetic resonance imaging
• functional connectivity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all participants in this experiment and all reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2023.2171493.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [NSFC, Grant Nos. 42230103] and the State Key Laboratory of Geo-Information Engineering and Key Laboratory of Surveying and Mapping Science and Geospatial Information Technology of MNR, CASM [Grant No. 2021-04-03].