Research by Assistant Professor Hiroyuki Muto received the Special Excellence Presentation Award at the 84th annual convention of the Japanese Psychological Association
Research by Assistant Professor Hiroyuki Muto received the Special Excellence Presentation Award at the 84th annual convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, which was held online from September 8 to November 2, 2020.
The cognitive process of understanding the location of objects from another viewpoint is called spatial perspective-taking (SPT). This ability is known to be associated with a variety of activities, such as interpersonal relationships, the use of tools, and navigation.
The Spatial Orientation Test (SOT), which is the most commonly used paper-and-pencil test for measuring one’s SPT ability, uses the accuracy in pointing at the direction of a target from different perspectives as an indicator of accuracy. The original scoring method had little theoretical basis and was incapable of separating response bias from accuracy of judgment. In this study, we proposed a method to separate response bias from accuracy and score them by applying a probability distribution used in directional statistics. Through using real data, we found that the SOT score proposed in this study was more strongly correlated with another index measuring the ability of SPT than the original SOT score. The method proposed in this study is expected to contribute to a more accurate measurement of SPT ability.
[Title of Presentation]
An improved scoring method for the Spatial Orientation Test: Statistical modeling of angular data with the von Mises distribution
[Presenter]
Hiroyuki Muto
[Website for Presentation Award]
https://psych.or.jp/prize/conf/ (In Japanese.)
2020/11/05