Help me out by taking this spatial ability test | Hacker News Reader

Help me out by taking this spatial ability test

psych.io

24 pointsasher_61 comments

If you have 10 minutes spare, please give this a shot. Many thanks in advance.

Darn! 8/9 This should tell you which one you got wrong, because now its going to drive me crazy.

Agreed, same here. SPOILER The consensus seems to be that 8 has more than one answer, I definitely see 8A as different from the others (arrows pointing away from each other as opposed to perpendicular), but perhaps there is another one. Brain is too tired to figure out another possibility right now; thanks for the workout :)

BTW #6 I found most difficult (even more so than #9), and #7 was far too easy for its position.

TO AUTHOR: The answer key for #6 is wrong. It should be A, not C. (The boxes are on the LHS of the frontmost arrow in A; they are on the RHS of the other three.)

Yes, No. 8 has certainly an error. At least the version I got first, if I load the page now I get a different set of cubes.

Proof: https://imgur.com/a/rH5kW

That's exactly the one I had (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3186671). I was pretty sure it was non-unique, but I'm glad you checked it properly!

9/9... but with submitting twice (first try: 7/9)

The tests that have only different symbols are much easier than the ones where symbols are repeated.

For example for question 1, without actually building the whole of the cube in one's head, it's quite obvious that the circle is always on the left side of the heart, except in one case where it will be at the top, and since the cubes have to be absolutely identical one doesn't need to look further than the first difference.

(Edit: if the test is different for each taker, the above example is meaningless, of course.)

Yes, there are many moderators of difficulty.

We had some requirements for the test which included graded difficulty from very easy to very hard to be able to separate out people of different abilities over a regular population.

We were supposed to design the first question so that 100% of people got it correct; to be an easy, practice type question.

Also, you guys aren't even getting to see our hardest questions :D Take a look at http://psych.io/spatial/hard.jpg for example!

The trick of pairing opposite faces to create a 3-tuple of directions drawn from {opposite,same,sideways} for each cube makes this possible to answer without much spatial reasoning.

Without any tricks I find it hard to believe anyone can do this one. It'd be hard to find a different holding the solid cubes.

Really hard indeed!. Mind blowing. At first I thought C but then I cheated ( it is hard even cheating...) and drawing the diferent posibilities I only see A=D and B=C. I dOn't know what I am missing.

If there aren't at least 2 which are uniquely different from the others I'll eat my hat

Nice. I believe I know the answer, though.

I found all of them very easy except "question 6", at which I'm still failing hard to visualize the difference, and is the only one I got wrong. (I had to choose a random one)

Sorry guys, had an incorrect marking key for the test, fixed it now.

My greatest apologies for those who didn't get a correct score back, ill put up your scores with the last half of your IP addresses very soon!

I'm pretty sure I got them all right, and it told me I only had 2 correct. You might want to double-check the marking key.

That 'mistake' is part of the test isn't it ;)

Looking for opposing face pairs is the easy method, and works on most of the questions (I think 6 of the 9.)

If all the opposing pairs are the same, there are two more ways to distinguish. One is the placement of the symbols relative to each other; the chirality of the whole object. For an example, think of a six-sided die. Position it so that the 6 is on top and 2 is towards you. The left and right faces will be the 3 and 4, in either order, creating two distinct possibilities.

The other remaining distinction is the orientation of the symbols on each face. Continuing the die example, with the 6 on top and the 2 towards you, the 2 pips can have either of two diagonal orientations. Orientation creates a possibility space of 2^N * 4^M where N is the number of sides with 2-way orientation distinguishability and M is the number of sides with 4-way distinguishability. On a normal die, N = 3 since the 2, 3, and 6 are 2-way orientable, and M = 0. Some of the questions here have M > 0, specifically the arrows and hearts.

(I'm ignoring cases where rotating the whole cube creates duplicate possibilities. Consider one side with an arrow and 5 blank sides; although the arrow has 4 orientations, they are not distinguishable. I'm also ignoring the possibility of rotating a symbol in non-90° increments.)

What I have found is that the higher intelligence/spatial ability type people are able to use these types of techniques on more difficult questions. I do very well on traditional spatial tests because they are trivial with relational or structural comparison.

Here is a real challenge.. can you think of a design for a spatial ability test (that is able to be done on pen/paper) that does not allow for this type of strategy? :)

9/9, first try. Here's how I solved each one (rot13 to avoid unintentional spoilers): 1. Vf gur Fdhner arkg gb gur Pvepyr? 2. Bevrag gur phor fb gung gur Urneg vf va abezny cbfvgvba (gvc qbja) snpvat lbh. Jung funcr vf ba gur yrsg snpr? 3. Jung funcr vf bccbfvgr gur Pvepyr? 4. Vf gur Neebj cbvagvat ng gur Pvepyr? 5. Vf gur Neebj cbvagvat ng gur Pvepyr? 6. Bevrag gur phor fb gur pvepyr jvgu gur neebj cbvagvat njnl sebz vg vf snpvat lbh, naq gung neebj vf ba gbc, cbvagvat njnl sebz lbh. Jung funcr vf ba gur evtug snpr? 7. Bevrag gur phor fb gur pvepyr vf snpvat lbh. Gur neebj vf cbvagvat gbjneq gur urneg va jung bevragngvba? 8. Vf gurer n gevnatyr cbvagvat ng n pvepyr? 9. Rnpu phor unf ybbc bs 4 snprf pbafvfgvat bs n oynax fheebhaqrq ol 3 urnegf. Ner obgu urnegf ba rvgure fvqr bs gur oynax cbvagvat va gur fnzr qverpgvba (abegu fbhgu rnfg jrfg hc qbja)?

Not sure if this is the kind of spatial ability they're trying to test.

My head hurts now. An interesting test of one's ability to hold a detailed object in short term memory while confusing yourself with speculations and arguments... Knowing psychologists, though, the real test was probably something quite different.

If it was being timed, perhaps I shouldn't have gone and made myself a coffee halfway through.

Hmmm, 2 out of 9 and no feedback? I have to say I find that deeply frustrating :)

Also, I have no idea what you're collecting data for or anything; I just gave you my time, please let me know what you've done with it. Hope you get the results you wanted.

Edit: Apparently I scored 8/9, which is less frustrating :)

This is for a psych project. It is quite a bit harder than most spatial ability tests. Most spatial ability tests are easy to do with non-spatial methods. We have designed this item format to (hopefully) not be the case.

Our results so far have shown that not having a time limit doesn't affect the results substantially either, unlike most other spatial tests. It is a test of what you are able to do rather than how quickly you can do something.

Thanks, that's cool. Yeah, I had to manually rotate things in my mind to solve it, although there are a few where the sequences give it away, e.g. 5 the arrow points away from the cross.

Didn't give me a score ...

I'm fairly certain that for my Q8 (2 squares, 2 circles & 2 triangles on each), there was no unique odd one out. For A & C the triangles pointed opposite directions when assembled, and B & D they pointed in the same direction.

This seems to be fixed now (on C they point perpendicularly), but I'm still getting 8/9. ('course it's possible I missed another one...)

I reached the same conclusion.

Holy shit. I managed to focus for four, got told I only had one right, which surprises me. That may very well be the hardest reasoning test I've ever seen.

I'm not sure it takes into consideration the orientation of the image, I was using that as a short cut - E.G. arrow points to circle and such.

This made about half of them solvable by inspection in under 15 seconds for me. However the result was 1 out of 9. Using this same approach the 8th question was obviously flawed, I wasn't about to go back and try a different method at that point though.

I originally uploaded the incorrect items, of which one contained a flaw (I scored it as correct for everyone in that early group).

In the easy questions you can indeed use those structural techniques, but in the harder ones you couldn't.

In the 'gold standard' spatial tests that currently exist you can use these kinds of queues for almost every item very easily, which is why we introduced this method.

Also, we need to take into account the vastly higher than average intelligence at HN compared to the general population; you guys are outrageously outperforming undergraduate psych students so far :-)

So, what is this short study for?

This is excruciatingly difficult. I have no experience with this sort of a test, and the method that I chose (albeit quickly and without a whole lot of thought) was to pick four sides that were touching, and try to find the one pattern that didn't have the same four sides touching.

This logic obviously didn't work, because I got 1 / 9. Does anyone have a strategy for this, or is it pure logic?

I found it easier to pick and compare opposite faces.

This didn't work for exactly 3 of them (the ones with repeated symbols), so went with educated guesses there.

Curiously, I got 6/9.

I got no feedback whatsoever from taking that - it just said "thank you taking the test!" without any results. Disappointing.

For those of you that took the test earlier, go to http://psych.io/spatial/scores.php for your correct score. It will work as long as you have the same IP as beofre. Sorry again about the mix up to start.

And thankyou so much to everyone that is doing this!

Cool thanks. 8/9 :)

I may as well link you guys to http://cube.asher.io as well. It only works in chrome though! It is a web page that I banged up in a night that we used to create the items. No instructions on it though - try drag and drop :D

Took my time (around 10 mins) and got 8/9 Decided to make a new try selecting randomly (around 10 seconds) and got 4/9. Old lesson from engineering school reminded: usually the most accurate is not the most cost effective solution.

It is a test to see the frustration of people seeing 8/9 when they are sure of their answers (BBACCADAA). The answer to http://psych.io/spatial/hard.jpg is A.

It seems broken to me. 1 of 9 and I'm normally off the charts on spatial ability. It was sitting in my browser window for a while but that shouldn't matter if the problem was a wrong answer key.

4/9. I was fighting impatience for a good deal of the time. This may be intentional, but if not, some added context as to the purpose may have given me more reason to focus. Or not ;-)

8/9 the best way is IMHO not trying to build the 3d mental cube but moving and rotating the faces to the same axis and then compare. The 3d memtal model is elusive sometimes

7/9... I thought I'd score worse, since they say women have trouble with spatial problems.

A pity the test didn't say which ones I failed, though.

8/9 first try, after cheating I figured out what I missed. I swear there's something wrong with Q5, I've been staring at it for 10 minutes :)

This is my Q6. I picked A but the test wants C.

http://imgur.com/VyW30

There's something wrong about this test. There was definitely one of the question where no three cubes were the same.

Well I tried to help out, but it said I got 0 of 9 correct. When I went back, the images were all different.

what? It just told me thanks for submitting.. I feel robbed! no answers.

Spoiler alert

. . .

Hm. I might have "cheated" on this. I haven't tried to imagine the actual 2D->3D transformations but instead looked for clues in the 2D images. It's a bit hard to describe - transforming the cutouts in my head so that they match (or obviously differ) in 2D while still giving the same cube.

Did not submit though, since I got tired after the 4th set.

All spatial tests are able to be solved with structural techniques rather than spatial ones.

We have designed this test in response to that flaw so that when it comes to the harder items it is much more difficult to do so than to use the intended mental transformation and rotation techniques.

Partially failed with me. I had to think of more and more elaborate transformation techniques over time, however, and apparently that failed for one test (I got 8 out of 9) (I really would have liked to know where I screwed up, though you may be afraid that cheating skews your results).

But, to come up with those "cheats", I had to imagine the 3D cube folding before me. Number 6 in particular had me do a more thorough analysis than most (but I still came up with a way to cheat, then used it).

I found the easiest way to do this test was to first find something the uniquely determined the the the position and rotation of the cube. Then I would see which edges were adjacent by folding in my head. I would use this to gradually construct a 010 111 010 010 canonical 2d picture of one picture. I would then compare the others to this one.

I couldn't hold a 3d picture in memory. 2d and graphs on the other hand..

8/9 points

I'm surprised I got 7/9 considering my inability to nicely position furniture in a room.

Holy crap. I thought I was good at this; only got 8 out of 9.

1 out of 9. I felt quite certain about every answer.

I'm checking the answers by trial and error, and it seems pretty clear that the key is still wrong. Is this part of the experiment?

Same here. My first reaction was, "Surely it means to say I got one wrong out of nine." But I don't know which one.

8/9 now and question 8 has no accepted answer. I feel better about it now.

8/9- that was super fun and challenging!

Great! Thanks for your data :D I'm glad you enjoyed it. You wouldn't imagine how many complaints we got from fellow students.

you should have a "I give up" choice

Done. But I didn't get any results?

Seems that everyone gets different questions btw, my q8 was nothing like screwt's, I didn't have that image at all.

It seems to be giving feedback now, 7/9. As others have said, for our own curiousness it would have been nice to know which ones we got wrong!

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