Computer-Controlled Testing of Visual-Spatial Ability.
Abstract
Identifying people who have high spatial-visual ability would facilitate the assignment of individuals to occupations where success depends on those skills. The major facilitation would be expected for jobs requiring machinery operations and/or the reading of analog displays and diagrams. Traditionally, spatial-visual ability has been tested by asking people to reason about pictures presented in a conventional paper-and-pencil format. The advent of computer-controlled testing makes it possible to make much finer measures of how people reason about a visual scene, and to measure reasoning about absolute and relative motion. The purpose of this research is to (1) develop tests of spatial-visual reasoning that take advantage of computer technology, (2) determine if these tests measure any dimensions of spatial-visual ability not measured by current tests, and (3) provide these new tests to the Navy for further investigation as tools in personnel classification. Eleven computer-administered tasks requiring spatial-visual ability were developed. Six of these took advantage of the computer's ability to present moving objects. Five took advantage of the computer's ability to measure reaction time for individual problems. These tasks and eight conventional paper-and-pencil tests were given to 170 college students. Scores were correlated, and multivariate factor analyses were conducted.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADA183971
Entities
People
- David L. Alderton
- Earl Hunt
- James W. Pellegrino
- Ronald Abate
- Simon A. Farr
Organizations
- University of Washington