Mental Rotation with Martial Arts Experts

This research aims to investigate whether expertise, specifically martial arts expertise, is transferable across domains, which would indicate spatial skills in one task can also apply to a seemingly unrelated one. In this study, reaction time during a mental rotation task was compared between experts and novices. Participants were shown two images and had to decide if the images were the same or mirror reflections. The images were comprised of Shepard-Metzler blocks, people in martial arts poses, and people in neutral poses. The results suggest expertise is not transferable across domains. While experts outperformed novices with some of the martial arts stimuli, there was not a significant difference with the neutral poses. Novices performed better than experts with the Shepard-Metzler blocks. This suggests experts may have embodied some of the stimuli to facilitate faster reaction times. Further research must be conducted to investigate if any type of expertise is transferable across domains, which could assist in the development of employee training programs, and to validate the human figures used as stimuli