Spatial reasoning test scored as three abilities, not one

Turning uses the six pentominoes that differ from their own mirror image — F, L, N, P, Y and Z. One option is the shape turned; the other three are its mirror image at other angles. No rotation reaches a mirror image, so the item has an exact answer and counting squares eliminates nothing.

Folding asks which lettered face ends up opposite the star once a flat net becomes a cube — a relation drawn nowhere on the net. Each net is folded in software by rolling a cube across it square by square, and only arrangements where all six faces land distinctly are used.

Cutting asks what outline a plane leaves through a solid, across fourteen cases on six solids: cone, cylinder, square pyramid, cube, sphere and triangular prism. Its characteristic error is answering with the shape of the solid instead of the shape of the section — a slanted cut through a cone leaves an ellipse, and a cut across one corner of a cube leaves a triangle.

Eight items is a small sample, so each count carries a 95% interval wide enough to matter, and the result says in one line whether your best and worst intervals overlap. If they do, the gap between them is noise and all three came out much the same. Four options put chance at a quarter, so two of eight right is what guessing produces. There is no combined score anywhere, because adding the three would undo the one useful thing the run does.

The budget is eight minutes across the whole set, about twenty seconds an item if spent evenly, with no limit on any one item — a hard net can have as long as you think it is worth, and the items after it share what is left. The countdown stops when the tab goes behind something, and the item that was on screen is voided rather than resumed, since you would come back to a question you had already been looking at.

Turning is the best-quantified of the three, and the figure for it is a rate rather than a score: ≈ 17 ms per degree, from Shepard & Metzler (1971), Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects, Science. Eight untimed items cannot yield a rate, so none is printed here; it is measured with response time plotted against angle on the mental rotation test. Folding has sixteen items to itself, with the sheet opened back out after each practice item, on the paper folding test, and the construction version of the same ability — building a pattern rather than recognizing one — is the block design test. Spatial reasoning is one input to a general-ability score, not the score; a low sub-score here is not a verdict on anything broader.

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 visuospatial impairment or a learning difficulty. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.

Eight items per sub-scale cannot separate a genuine weakness from an unfamiliar interface, an interrupted afternoon or a screen too small for the net. If spatial difficulty is affecting driving, navigation or work, that assessment is done by a person, not a page.