2D Spatial Reasoning Skills and Eye Movements of Engineering Students in Noisy and Quiet Environments
摘要
Spatial reasoning ability is an essential skill for engineering students. Previous studies indicated that individuals who ineffectively identify embedded figures within complex visual patterns exhibit more disoriented and disorganized eye movements. This study examines whether 2D spatial reasoning performance can be affected by environmental noise and predicted by eye movement features. The Hidden Figure Test was conducted on 26 undergraduate engineering students enrolling in the same education program, while their eye movements were recorded by a VT3 Mini eye tracker at 60 Hz. These subjects were divided into 2 groups based on experimental settings (13 in noisy and 13 in quiet environments), and each subject performed 5 tests. The Mann-Whitney U test indicated that both the number of correct answers and fixations were statistically different between the 2 groups (p < 0.001), and they had a significant Spearman correlation (0.78, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that 2D spatial reasoning performance is significantly affected by environmental noise and can be predicted by the number of fixations.