A study of behavioural, cognitive and neural markers underlying visuospatial learning

Visuospatial (VS) learning is an education format noted for encouraging an individual to use visual exploration and their innate spatial ability in constructing a flexible ‘internal mental representation’ of three-dimensional information. Being a discipline reliant upon this informed consideration, VS methods have found particular application in anatomy education – with tangential evidence linking the inclusion of these methods to greater student understanding of anatomical concepts. Building on these findings, this thesis investigates: (i) the extent of individual and group learning benefits that accompany VS instruction within anatomy education, and (ii) a novel exploration of the cognitive and neuroscientific mechanisms that govern their success. To chart the success of instructional methodology in our reporting, we selected an array of academic performance and accompanying engagement indices. These items had been expressed by numerous modestly-powered prior studies, encompassing a diversity of anatomy cohorts, to be heightened under VS learning. Our initial work in Chapter 2 was therefore to determine if these effects were preserved when VS instruction was introduced within a substantially larger undergraduate anatomy cohort. Findings substantiated the wider applicability of this teaching method, with academic scores in each of the examined categories (didactic, spatial, and extrapolation) being superior to standard course delivery. Conflictingly, lower engagement and desire for VS inclusion was noted in the group receiving this instruction – leading us to attribute this to prevailing misconceptions about the nature of VS learning. In order to determine whether benefits found to characterise VS teaching in anatomy were universally applicable, or attributable to a myriad of demographic and cognitive factors, Chapter 3 explored variation in individual spatial capacity. Interestingly, the prevailing advantage of raw spatial aptitude in males was not associated with improved practical performance. This subsequently allowed a component of underlying psychological reasoning, namely visualisation (Vz) ability, to be highlighted as the clearest indicator of one’s ability to transfer raw spatial intelligence into practical VS understanding. Accompanying the misconceptions of VS learning reported in Chapter 2, participants were found to be poor estimators of their VS ability. Having established that spatial reasoning in anatomy possesses a physiological basis, we conducted a novel exploration of the neuroscientific mechanism evoked in VS learning using electroencephalography (EEG) technology (Chapter 4). This was evaluated by monitoring the neural signals of individuals engaged in two anatomical education workshops (featuring standard or VS instruction). No significant differences in oscillatory power accounted for the influence of VS instruction within any of the assessed frequency ranges (2-45Hz). Objective task outcomes were consistent with those in Chapter 2, finding a similarly elevated ability to address spatial questions following VS instruction. When placed together, the results of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 demonstrate the explicit advantages present for VS instruction in anatomy education. Though further work is required to isolate the specific underlying neural pathways, this appears linked to passive changes in how the human brain processes and later consolidates this information. Findings have important implications for advancing medical educational strategy (Appendix Descriptive Review), and wider understanding of the mechanisms that govern learning.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Adelaide Medical School, 202