I’ve long been fascinated by mental imagery and how it transforms, especially in the mental rotation paradigm—Roger Shepard’s classic, elegantly simple task that reveals so much about spatial thinking. Since my undergraduate years, I’ve been struck by the findings on gender differences in mental rotation and their links to STEM-related outcomes. I began by examining the spatial mechanisms of mental rotation, but my ongoing work centers on the affective and decision processes that influence performance on cognitively demanding tasks such as mental rotation. I am especially interested in the developmental origins of gender differences on mental rotation tasks.
Affect-imbued Spatial Cognition
What I ask
When and why do anxiety, motivation, and task contexts change mental rotation performance? Which parts of performance reflect perceptual limits, and which reflect decision strategy?
What I’ve found
- Affect and motivation influence decision-making on spatial tasks—for example, changing caution (boundary separation) and evidence use (drift) rather than altering raw perception alone.
- Apparent gender gaps can be reduced or diminished depending on task emphasis (speed vs. accuracy) and recent trial history, pointing to malleable mechanisms.
- In young children, the trial sequence (easy vs. hard) influences performance, with stronger boosts in girls than in boys, suggesting potential affective mechanisms underlying the easy–hard learning sequence.
How I study it
I use both experimental paradigms and computational modeling (drift diffusion modeling)