Individual differences in use of external visualisations to perform an internal visualisation task

Thirty participants performed a novel spatial inference task, which required them to imagine and draw the cross section of a three‐dimensional (3‐D) object. While performing the task, participants could interactively control two computer visualisations (animations) of the object. There were large individual differences in how frequently participants used the computer visualisations, which were related to spatial ability. Use of the interactive visualisations was highly predictive of performance on the cross‐section task and mediated the correlation between spatial ability and performance. These findings suggest that interactive computer visualisations can aid performance on spatial inference tasks, but that they do so only for a subset of individuals who can discover how to best use the additional information that they provide.