Sense of Direction & Mental Rotation Among College Students

Abstract

Introduction: The Sense of direction is understood as “knowledge of the body’s facing direction relative to a stable spatial framework anchored to the environment” (Sholl et al., 2006). Mental rotation is understood as “a dynamic process which requires mentally rotating a stimulus in order to align it with another reference stimulus, judging whether both stimuli are the same” (Shepard and Metzler, 1971). The above variables seem to vary across gender. Method: Sense of direction has been measured using Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (Hegarty et al., 2002) and mental rotation has been assessed using Mental Rotation Task (Collins & Kimura, 1997). The sample comprised of 143 (81 males and 62 females) subjects between age ranges of 18-22 years with mean age as 21.54 years. Analysis of variance was used for analysing the results. Results:  Sense of direction and mental rotation seems to vary amongst college students as a result of gender. Conclusion: Males were found to have better sense of direction than females, no significant differences were found in the performance of males and females in mental rotation in our study.