Block design test where solved and solved fast stay separate

Eight patterns to rebuild square by square — three of four blocks with a minute each, five of nine blocks with two minutes each. Every square takes one of six choices: solid red, solid white, or the red-and-white diagonal in any of its four turns. The clock stops the moment the grid matches, and the report gives designs finished, how many of those were finished inside a third of their limit, and how many placements each one took.

8 designs
60 s and 120 s limits
Placements counted

Reproduce a printed design with blocks. Every square shows one of six choices — solid red, solid white, or the red-and-white diagonal at one of its four quarter turns, which is everything a real block can show from above — so the whole task is choosing one for each square. 8 designs: three of four blocks with 60 seconds each, five of nine blocks with 120.

The six choices

solid red
solid white
split with red in the top left
split with red in the top right
split with red in the bottom right
split with red in the bottom left

Red against white is a difference in lightness as well as in hue, so the two are distinguishable without any color vision at all — which matters here, because the alternative would be a construction task that quietly measured the retina.

The scoring schedule, in full, before you start

Designs: 8 — three of four blocks, five of nine
Limits: 60 seconds for a four-block design, 120 for a nine-block one
Base: 4 points for finishing a four-block design, 6 for a nine-block one
Bonus: 4 more inside a third of the limit, 2 inside half, nothing after that
Blocks: unlimited supply; a square shows solid red, solid white or the diagonal in one of four turns
Also recorded: placements made, against the number the design needs

Those limits and those bonuses are this page’s own and are printed here so that a second run means something. They are not taken from any published administration, and a total from this page converts to no scale used anywhere else.

The practice design has no limit on it and is scored nowhere. Take it if you have not dragged blocks in a browser before — the controls costing you thirty seconds is the one way this version can measure something it did not mean to.

Questions this test gets asked

What does a block design test measure?

Whether you can break a pattern into parts and build it back out of pieces that do not look like the parts. Each square of a design is one block face, but the eye sees triangles, stripes and diamonds that run across several squares, so the work is decomposing the picture into squares and then producing it with your hands. That puts perception and action in one loop, and it is why the placement count matters here: nine placements on a nine-block design means the pattern was decomposed before the first move, thirty means faces were tried and replaced until the cells looked right.

Is this the block design subtest from an IQ battery?

No. It is the construction task that subtest was built from, rebuilt in a browser with patterns, limits and points of our own. The published subtest is a physical kit of blocks, a printed booklet of designs, an examiner who watches how you work, and a norm table that converts raw performance into a scaled score — none of which exists here. A number from this page cannot be entered into any battery or compared with a scaled score.

Is there a time bonus, and what is my score without it?

There is a bonus, and the score without it is the first column. The report keeps designs finished apart from designs finished fast, so a run judged on completion alone is read straight off the table. Where the two are combined into points, the schedule is printed in full before you start: 4 points for a finished four-block design and 6 for a nine-block one, plus 4 more inside a third of the limit or 2 more inside half. It is this page's own schedule, not any published bonus table.

Kohs blocks, and what a browser keeps of them

The task is a century old, and it was made for diagnostic breadth: a construction test that needed no language, so it could be given to people whose verbal testing was uninformative. The cubes of the original, Kohs (1920), The block-design tests, Journal of Experimental Psychology, were painted in four colors: solid red, white, blue and yellow, with one face split red-and-white and one split blue-and-yellow. The red-and-white cube of later versions keeps the first pair only — two faces solid red, two solid white, two split along the diagonal — the smallest set from which a two-color pattern with diagonal edges can be built at all. On screen the two solids are one choice each and the split face comes in its four turns, which is everything that cube can show from above.

The blocks transfer to a browser, the symmetric designs transfer and the clock transfers. The norm table does not: it is sold with the physical kit to qualified purchasers, so this page reports seconds, placements and its own points, and no scaled score of any kind. Dragging a square is also a different motor act from turning a cube in the hand, and a trackpad is different again from a mouse — that cost lands on every design equally, so comparisons within your own run survive it, but the raw seconds should not be lined up against any figure from a table-top administration. For the same ability with no hands in it, the spatial reasoning test asks you to recognize a construction among four options, and the paper folding test asks you to imagine a transformation and pick its result.

A reaction time here is the interval between the frame that painted the stimulus and the timestamp the browser attached to your key, both read from the same monotonic clock. What neither can see is the display pipeline behind it, so on a 60 Hz screen roughly 16 ms of every figure below is the machine rather than you. That is the timing floor: two numbers closer together than that are the same number, and this page reports no precision it cannot support.

The one figure the results panel prints in milliseconds is your fastest design, and against designs that take tens of seconds a frame is noise. Design times are taken from the frame that painted the design to the moment the last block landed, so they include the drag itself, as a wooden set would.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the owner of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is a trademark of its owner and is used here only to name the instrument this page is telling you it is not. The questions on this page are our own: no part of the published test is reproduced, and a score here is not comparable to a score from the real instrument.

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 a constructional difficulty, a right-hemisphere problem or anything a neuropsychologist tests for. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.