The importance of spatial thinking
In the article “Early Education for Spatial Intelligence: Why, What, and How”, Newcombe and Frick (2010) highlight four main reasons why psychologists, educational researchers, and teachers should focus their efforts on improving spatial thinking.
- Spatial intelligence has evolutionary and adaptive importance. Our sensory-motor ability as humans, also an evolutionary trait, is closely related to our ability to grasp and perceive with our senses the three-dimensional physical environment that surrounds us. Moreover, our ability to shape the environment (design and build cities, construct infrastructure to facilitate and secure our lives – dams, road networks, canals, tunnels and so) is reflected to how our spatial intelligence has evolved and adapted through the years of human presence on the Earth.
- Spatial thinking is complementary to verbal thinking; in fact, spatial ability, also called the Gv factor or visual processing, constitutes a second-order factor in Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) theory of human intelligence (McGrew, 2009), along with other 15 abilities. Moreover, spatial intelligence is one of the types of intelligence proposed in multiple-intelligence theory (Gardner, 1983).
- Spatial thinking allows transferring reasoning to abstract or other domains, not necessarily spatial themselves and vice versa. Indeed, diagrams often use spatial metaphors to communicate information (e.g., difference in heights on a bar chart rank countries according their Gross Domestic Product) or depict relations, structures and patterns in data. Spatialization, the process during which, abstract information spaces are represented onto the physical space through spatial metaphors (Kuhn and Blummenthal, 1996), is also, a manifestation of the transferability of spatial properties and cognition to represent and communicate abstract domains. Even more “traditional” tools of visuospatial information communication such as maps, become more and more valuable tools in displaying abstract phenomena such as population density, the spreading of diseases, flood susceptibility and many more.
- Finally, spatial thinking applies to STEAM disciplines. For instance, many advocate that the discovery of the DNA structure, as a double helix, by Watson and Crick in 1953, is an outcome of the spatial task of visualizing a 3d model of 2d pictures of the molecule. Another example is the way geoscientists have figured out the concept of Pangea from the current configuration and shapes of the Earth’s continents and formulated the theory of continental drift. In medicine, spatial thinking is extensively used by physicians looking at Magnetic Resonance Imaging to make their diagnoses or to determine outcomes of surgery. Finally, in the arts, choreographers and dancers, create rhythm, direction, and motion by controlling and shaping the three-dimensional space around them.
Bibliography
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Kuhn, W., & Blumenthal, B. (1996). Spatialization: spatial metaphors for user interfaces. Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
McGrew, K. (2009). CHC theory and the human cognitive abilities project: Standing on the shoulders of the giants of psychometric intelligence research. Intelligence, 37(1), 1–10.
Newcombe, N.S. and Frick, A. (2010). Early Education for Spatial Intelligence: Why, What, and How. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4: 102-111. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2010.01089.x