Anxious? Mental rotation is a challenge? Find out how this interacts.

Our paper “Not all anxious individuals get lost: Trait anxiety and mental rotation ability interact to explain performance in map-based route learning in men” (breathe now) written by John C. Thoresen, Rebecca Francelet, Arzu Coltekin, myself, Sara I. Fabrikant, and Carmen Sandi (breathe again) has just been published in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. In this paper we show that trait anxiety negatively affects participants with low (but not high) mental rotation ability in a map-based route learning task. The study contributes to a growing body of evidence that individual differences are a major driving force in explaining task performance.