AbilityBenchCognitive ability testing
Cognitive ability tests that show their working
18 full-length tests of reasoning, space, planning and control, language, vision and hearing, all running in this tab. Start with the twelve-item sampler below — three items each of verbal, numerical, abstract and spatial reasoning, thirty seconds an item. It tells you which of the four formats cost you, and for three of them it names the page that measures that format at length.
- 12-item sampler
- 30 seconds an item
- Every reference figure sourced
Twelve items, three each of verbal, numerical, abstract and spatial reasoning, at 30 seconds an item. It samples the four formats and tells you which of them cost you time; it is not an IQ test and it does not produce one, because twelve items of our own writing have no population to be ranked against.
What this run does, before you start it
- Items
- 12 scored, three each of verbal, numerical, abstract and spatial
- Time
- 30 seconds an item, running from the frame that paints it
- Scoring
- one point an item, four options, no penalty for a wrong answer
- Chance
- 3 of 12 — a run of pure guesses scores three on average
- Practice
- two untimed items with worked answers, offered first, never scored
- Void
- an item you were on when the tab went to the background is discarded and re-run, and so is one answered inside 150 ms of appearing
Six of the twelve items are drawings. They are black on white, so no part of this page depends on telling colors apart — but they do need sight of the figure, and a visitor using a screen reader should expect the abstract and spatial thirds to be unanswerable and read the verbal and numerical scores on their own.
All 19 tests
5 sections, the sampler above included. Each card says what that page measures that its neighbors do not.
Reasoning
4 testsCognitive Ability Test
Nineteen browser tests that measure instead of guessing: matrices and quantities, space, planning and control, language, vision and hearing. Each one shows its method, its scoring and where its reference figures come from — and none of them asks for your email to hand back your own result.
You are on this page
Matrix Reasoning, Raven's Format
Matrix items in the classic progressive format, with the item-construction rules named on the page and the reason a browser version cannot yield a clinical IQ score stated plainly.
Practice IQ Test, Mensa Format
A practice set in the format of supervised admission tests, with the honest part stated up front: no online test can qualify you for anything, and only a proctored session counts. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Mensa.
Math Aptitude Test
Whether you reason with quantities rather than whether you were taught a syllabus, using items that need no formula recall.
Spatial
4 testsBlock Design Test
Rebuild red-and-white block patterns against a time limit, with solved and solved-fast counted separately and the page's own bonus schedule printed rather than borrowed.
Paper Folding Test
Fold, punch, unfold: the classic visualisation task, scored with the guessing correction the original used.
Mental Rotation Test
Shepard-Metzler-style cube figures with response time plotted against rotation angle — the linear slope is the actual finding, and you get to see yours.
Spatial Reasoning Test
Rotation, folding and cross-section items reported as three sub-scores, because being good at one predicts little about the others.
Executive function
3 testsStop Signal Task
Estimates your stop-signal reaction time with a staircase procedure — the latency of the internal brake, which cannot be observed directly.
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test
Sort by a rule you are never told, which changes without warning; scored on perseverative errors, the measure the task was built to produce.
Tower of London Test
Planning measured as moves-above-minimum and first-move latency, not just whether you finished.
Language
4 testsEnglish Level Test
Places you on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2 across grammar, vocabulary and reading, with what each level means in practice.
Reading Level Test
Places your comprehension against grade-level bands, with the readability formula behind each band named.
Sentence Completion Test
Grammar and register judgment in context, the format used in language placement rather than in projective psychology.
Verbal Fluency Test
One minute per category and per letter, scored on total, clustering and switching — the three numbers this task was designed to yield.
Senses
4 testsDepth Perception Test
Four monocular depth cues — relative size, occlusion, texture scale and motion parallax — each scored with its own interval, starting with the pairs where two cues disagree.
Stereopsis Test
Random-dot depth that only appears if both eyes cooperate — no anaglyph glasses required, and the page says what it cannot see.
Misophonia Test
Trigger-sound sensitivity in the questionnaire format the research uses, with actual sound samples and an easy way out of any of them.
Rhythm Test
Tap along with a click, then hold the beat after it stops — scored on the spread of your intervals, the part of tapping that a browser's own delays cannot distort.
What “measures rather than guesses” means here
The difference is whether the number came from something you did. A questionnaire that asks you to rate your own self-control from one to five has measured your opinion of it; the stop signal task makes you cancel a keypress you have already started and estimates, in milliseconds, how long stopping takes. Only one of those would change if you were tired. Where a questionnaire is the only honest instrument — the misophonia test is the example here — the page says so, and keeps how strong a reaction is apart from what it costs you rather than adding them into one score.
The second half is the figure printed beside a result. Every reference figure on these pages names the study it came from, and where no defensible figure exists the page says that instead of inventing one: the card sort prints no percentile because the published tables belong to a test publisher, and the depth test prints ratios rather than arcseconds because it never asked for your screen size. How the timing works, what stays in your browser and what this site will not do are set out once, on the about page.
This is a measurement exercise, not a clinical assessment. It reports what you did on this page against a stated reference and nothing more — it cannot establish any condition at all, on any page of this site. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.
Before the sampler
Is this an IQ test?
No. The sampler reports how many of twelve items you got right against a chance floor of three, and stops there. An IQ figure is a position in a standardization sample — a published mean and spread, collected on people taking that exact test under supervision — and twelve items written for a website have none of that. The practice set in the format of supervised admission tests is the Mensa-format page, and it says the same thing at more length.
Why is my score here different from another site's?
Because the item difficulty is different and neither score sits on a common scale. Two sites can both call something a verbal reasoning test and set items years apart in difficulty, and without a shared standardization sample no arithmetic makes the two numbers comparable. What does carry over is the split between formats: being consistently slower on figure series than on word problems is a fact about you rather than about whose items you answered.