Anatomy Learning with Virtual Objects

Learning from virtual objects may be more cognitively and perceptually demanding than learning from real objects. Although, it is often assumed that virtual learning objects are as good as their real-world counterparts (Reznick & MacRae, 2008), which explains the growing trend to use interactive, virtual objects, to augment and even replace real-world experiences in classrooms and workplaces (Bearman, 2003). Basic research on object recognition supports the use of virtual resources in learning showing that actively controlling a virtual object (compared to passive viewing of the object) leads to more efficient recognition of the object after practice (James, Humphrey, & Goodale, 2001). However, research that used these methods to teach anatomy found that low-spatial individuals had particular difficulty manipulating virtual anatomical models and had poorer learning of anatomy compared to high-spatial individuals (Garg, Norman, Eva, Spero, & Sharan, 2002). This is understandable because the manual rotation of an unfamiliar object, including a virtual object, in a goaldirected task is guided by mental rotation, which is known to be spatially demanding (Ruddle & Jones, 2001; Wohlschläger & Wohlschläger, 1998). Virtual objects burden students with the need to form 3D mental representations from 2D representations on a computer screen. This burden is compounded by the impoverished visual and sensorimotor cues provided by virtual objects (Ware & Franck, 1996) and the interface used for rotating them (Ware & Rose, 1999). This raises the question of whether it may be possible to construct virtual objects in ways that mitigate the challenge of using and learning from them.