Spatial reasoning test: task types and practice

Spatial reasoning is the ability to picture shapes and how they change when you fold, cut or turn them. A spatial reasoning test checks it with drawings instead of words or numbers, and a clear method matters as much as a good imagination. This page goes through four common task types, the same four you find in our free test, and how to get quicker at each one.

What a spatial reasoning test looks like

Every task is a drawing. You see a flat shape, a folded sheet or a cube, and you pick the answer that shows what happens when it is folded, unfolded or turned. There is nothing to calculate and no vocabulary to know. The hard part is holding the picture steady in your head while you change it.

Tests mix task types differently, and the drawings vary a lot between publishers. The four types below are the ones we have built practice tasks for.

Paper folding: from flat net to solid

In this kind of paper folding test you see a flat net with dashed fold lines and four solids. Your job is to pick the solid the net folds into. Our nets fold into shapes such as prisms, pyramids, cuboids, cylinders, cones and half cylinders.

Counting gets you most of the way. A triangular prism has two triangles and three rectangles, so a net with four triangles cannot fold into one. Check the number and shape of the faces first, then look at which faces end up next to each other. Curved solids give their own clues: a cylinder’s net has two circles and a rectangle, and a cone’s net has a circle and a curved sector.

Cube folding: nets with symbols

A cube folding task shows a net of six squares, each with a symbol, and four cubes seen from a corner. Only one of the cubes can be folded from the net. There are 11 different nets that fold into a cube, so the same net shapes keep coming back.

Two rules settle most of these tasks. Squares two apart in a straight row of the net end up on opposite sides of the cube, so you can never see both at once. And when a symbol has a direction, such as an arrow, check where it points relative to its neighbors after folding. A cube that shows two opposite faces at the same time, or an arrow pointing the wrong way, can be ruled out right away.

Folding with cuts: unfolding in your head

Here a sheet of paper is folded once or twice, a piece is cut out, and you choose how the sheet looks when it is opened up. Every fold works like a mirror. A cut next to a fold line shows up on both sides of that line when the sheet is unfolded.

Work backward. Undo the last fold first and mirror the cut across it, then undo the fold before that and mirror everything again. With two folds, a single cut often becomes four holes. In our tasks, the wrong options are the patterns you get from mirroring across the wrong line, skipping one of the mirrorings or placing the cut in the wrong spot.

Rotated cubes: mental rotation

A mental rotation test asks whether two figures are the same object turned in space. In our version you see two or three cubes, each with six different symbols, and decide whether they could be the same cube seen from different sides, or which of them could be.

Find a symbol that shows on both cubes and turn one cube in your head until that symbol sits the same way on both. Then check its neighbors. If two shared symbols sit next to each other in a different order, or a symbol with a direction points another way, the cubes are different. Turning one whole cube works better than comparing the faces one at a time.

How to practice spatial reasoning

Scores on ability tests tend to rise a little on a second attempt. A meta-analysis of 50 studies found an average gain of 0.26 standard deviations, with larger gains when the format was the same. With spatial tasks, most of that comes from having a method ready for each type, so you stop working it out from scratch every time.

• Learn one rule per task type: count faces for solids, find opposite faces for cube nets, mirror backward for cuts.
• Use real paper when you get stuck. Fold a cube net or cut a folded sheet once, and the drawings start to make sense.
• Practice against the clock. Our free test gives you 60 seconds for each folding task and 45 seconds for each cube rotation task.
• Read the explanation for every task you miss and find the point where your picture went wrong.

Our free spatial reasoning test has 12 tasks: three paper folding tasks, three cube nets, three folding tasks with cuts and three rotated cubes. You get a clock, your result and an explanation for every task, with new tasks every time and no account. To practice patterns in figures, read the guide to abstract reasoning tests. For patterns in numbers, see the number series test guide.

All our drawings are our own and are not taken from any test publisher.