Enhancing Spatial and Temporal Cognitive Ability in Construction Education through the Effect of Artificial Visualizations

The Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) workforce requires training on the systematic coordination the complex relationships of the interdependencies, interactions and constraints among engineering systems. The understanding of these relationships presents a significant challenge to master CEM practices in-situ. It is essential to fully develop the learning abilities to effectively incorporate the interdependencies and interactions with constraints to solve problems. Building upon our previous research, where we defined the individual’s spatial and temporal cognitive ability as the ability to couple and combine qualitative temporal and spatial abstractions, this research addresses the problem of mastering the complex relationships of the interdependencies, interactions and constraints. We use a layer of artificial visualizations to simulate the contexts where such spatial and temporal constraints are easily and rapidly observed. The superimposition of virtual objects on images is an Augmented Reality (AR) layer that serves as an instructional. The assumption is that the enhancement of spatial-temporal constraints enables learners to visualize context and hidden processes in situ.