The relation between spatial anxiety and spatial skills is moderated by visuospatial working memory and grade level

Spatial skills are critical for learning in STEM areas and are affected by spatial anxiety and working memory. Prior work also showed that there are interaction effects between spatial anxiety and verbal working memory (WM) on spatial skills, such that the negative relation between spatial anxiety and spatial skills is stronger among higher- than lower-verbal WM children. To date, this interaction effect has not been found for visuospatial WM. However, a recent meta-analysis showed that both verbal WM and visuospatial WM are impaired by anxiety to a similar extent. The current study hypothesized that visuospatial WM interacts with spatial anxiety on spatial skills and that this interaction effect gets stronger as age increases. We investigated spatial anxiety, visuospatial WM, and two spatial skills (mental transformation and mental rotation) in 402 U.S. children in first to fourth grades. We found a significant three-way interaction of spatial anxiety, visuospatial WM, and grade level on mental transformation skill: only fourth-graders with high visuospatial WM showed a significant relation between spatial anxiety and lower mental transformation skills, whereas low-visuospatial WM fourth-graders and children in Grades 1 to 3 did not show this relation. However, this effect was not significant for children’s mental rotation skills. We discuss the results in terms of age-related differences in visuospatial WM and strategy use, as well as differences between the mental transformation and mental rotation tasks. Our findings indicate that the interaction effect between spatial anxiety and working memory on spatial skills extends beyond verbal WM to visuospatial WM and becomes more pronounced as children's age increases.