What Is Spatial Reasoning?

Spatial reasoning is the ability to picture objects and spaces in your mind and work out how they relate, move and change, such as turning a shape, folding a net into a box or imagining a room from another angle. It sits alongside verbal and numerical reasoning as one of the main ways people solve problems. It is also one of the most often overlooked, even though research links it closely to science, engineering and mathematics.

What is spatial reasoning?

At its simplest, spatial reasoning is thinking about where things are and how they fit together. Northwestern psychologist David Uttal describes it as being "largely about relations": noticing patterns, connections, variations and movements across space. A widely cited definition from Lohman (1996) lists the abilities to mentally visualise, retrieve, transform, rotate, represent and recognise symbolic information.

You use it constantly without naming it. Reversing a car into a tight space, packing a boot, following a flat-pack diagram or reading a map all depend on holding a mental picture and manipulating it. Spatial reasoning is not the same as eyesight, either. Research on people with visual impairment shows that blind people can recognise shapes through touch, turning tactile sensations into mental estimates of length and form.

Which skills make up spatial reasoning?

Spatial reasoning is a family of related skills rather than one single ability. The ones researchers study most are:

• Mental rotation: imagining an object turned to a new orientation and judging whether it matches another.
• Perspective taking: imagining how a scene would look if you moved around it.
• Visualisation: building and transforming images in your head, such as folding paper or assembling parts.
• Navigation: keeping track of routes, directions and your position in an environment.
• Noticing fine detail: spotting small differences between shapes, faces or scenes.

Mental rotation and perspective taking have been examined from developmental, cognitive, psychometric and neuroscientific angles, and mental rotation has the strongest evidence of a link with STEM learning. Spatial tasks also overlap with pattern recognition, since many puzzles ask you to spot how a shape changes from one step to the next.

How does spatial reasoning fit into theories of intelligence?

Howard Gardner named spatial intelligence as one of the nine intelligences in his theory of multiple intelligences. He described it as a capacity for solving problems of navigation, seeing objects from different angles, recognising faces and scenes, and noticing fine details. Gardner linked it to occupations such as designers, architects, taxi drivers, pilots, astronauts and race car drivers.

Researchers Nora Newcombe and Andrea Frick describe spatial thinking as the principal complement to verbal thinking. They also note that it helps in areas that do not look spatial at first, because diagrams and spatial metaphors help people understand rankings and hierarchies such as family trees or biological classifications.

In traditional IQ testing, spatial tasks usually sit within non-verbal or perceptual reasoning, closer to problem solving on the spot than to learned knowledge. That places them nearer the fluid side of fluid vs crystallised intelligence.

Why does spatial reasoning matter for STEM?

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics lean heavily on relational thinking. Uttal points to working with DNA, the structure of atoms, mapping planetary orbits and the way numbers work as examples that all involve spatial reasoning, and notes that research links it to innovation and creativity in STEM fields.

One classic case is the discovery of the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick succeeded when they fitted a three-dimensional model to Rosalind Franklin's flat images of the molecule, which is clearly a spatial task. Everyday professional work follows the same pattern: a geoscientist pictures the processes that shaped the Earth, an engineer anticipates how forces will act on a structure, and a neurosurgeon visualises brain areas from scans.

Spatial skill also matters well beyond the lab. Writer Adam Gopnik used ice hockey, and the player Wayne Gretzky in particular, to describe spatial intelligence as grasping a fast-changing whole and anticipating its next stage.

Why is spatial reasoning often overlooked?

Schools mainly assess reading and mathematics, and verbal and mathematical reasoning tests are common tools for identifying gifted pupils. Spatial reasoning, by contrast, is rarely taught deliberately or discussed in most school settings. Daniel Ness, Stephen Farenga and Salvatore Garofalo point out that it is often missing from standardised tests and entrance examinations, which means people strong in spatial relations can go unnoticed.

This is the focus of a talent development project led by Joni Lakin of the University of Alabama, working with Uttal and Northwestern's Center for Talent Development. The four-year grant follows 2,300 students and 30 teachers in urban, rural and suburban districts in Illinois, Alabama and Arkansas, with work including a large validity study, cognitive lab and eye-tracking research. Final analysis was scheduled for 2025. The aim is to help teachers recognise and build pupils' spatial abilities.

What is a spatial reasoning test like?

A spatial reasoning test presents shapes, diagrams or scenes and asks you to work something out about them, usually under a time limit and in multiple-choice format. Common question types include:

• Rotation: which option is the same shape turned, rather than a mirror image?
• Cube and net folding: which cube could this flat net make, or which faces end up opposite?
• Paper folding and punching: where do the holes appear once the paper is unfolded?
• Perspective and views: what does this object look like from above or from the side?
• Shape assembly: which pieces combine to form the target shape?

Questions usually get harder as you go, with more complex shapes or more steps. Employers use these tests for technical and design roles, and educational assessments use them to spot ability that verbal tests miss. If you are taking one online, it helps to know how accurate online IQ tests are before reading too much into a single result.

Practice puzzles to try

Try each in your head before reading the answer. No pen, no rotating your phone.

• 1. Rotation. Picture a capital letter F. Is the long upright stroke now on the left or the right, and which way do the short arms point?
  Answer: The upright is on the right, and the arms point left, now sitting at the bottom and middle rather than the top and middle.
• 2. Cube net. A net has four squares in a vertical column, numbered 1 to 4 from top to bottom, plus one square attached to each side of square 2. Fold it into a cube. Which square is opposite square 1?
  Answer: Square 3. In a column of four, alternate squares face each other, and the two side squares face each other.
• 3. Paper folding. Fold a square sheet in half, then in half again to make a smaller square. Punch one hole through the middle of the folded square, away from all edges. How many holes are there when you unfold it?
  Answer: Four, arranged symmetrically, because the punch went through four layers.
• 4. Perspective. You face north across a table. A cup is on the left of the table and a book on the right. You walk to the far side and face south. Where is the cup?
  Answer: On your right.
• 5. Navigation. Start facing north. Turn right, turn right again, then turn left. Which way are you facing?
  Answer: East (north, east, south, then east).

For more questions with worked explanations, our practice puzzles cover spatial and pattern items.

Can you improve spatial reasoning?

Yes. Uttal stresses that spatial thinking can be substantially improved by practice, and that mindset matters: people who decide they are "not good" at something tend not to practise it. Research on how spatial skills develop in children, and how activities outside school encourage them, is ongoing.

Practical ways to build the skill include:

• Working through rotation, folding and net puzzles regularly, checking answers to see where your mental image went wrong.
• Building with simple blocks. Ness, Farenga and Garofalo suggest that plain cuboidal blocks may help more than highly specialised construction pieces.
• Drawing objects from different viewpoints, or sketching a room from above.
• Navigating without turn-by-turn directions and using a paper map.

Expect gains on the tasks you practise. Familiarity with question formats also helps on tests, which is worth keeping in mind when comparing scores.

How should you read a spatial reasoning score?

A spatial score describes how you did on a particular set of tasks on a particular day. It can be affected by time pressure, tiredness, familiarity with the format and how the test was built. A low score does not mean you cannot do spatial work, and a high one is not a guarantee of success in engineering or design.

If you are curious how a result is calculated, our page on how our test is scored explains the process. If you or your child has persistent difficulty with direction, judging distances or copying shapes that affects daily life or school, speak to a GP, teacher or educational psychologist rather than relying on any online test.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Spatial intelligence (psychology) (Wikipedia)
2. The Importance of Spatial Reasoning as a Talent Development Focus | Northwestern Center for Talent Development