Visual Thinking Research

Block Twins

This block puzzle was slightly ambiguous, and my roommate and I both had different ideas about how it was supposed to work. I thought it was asking which shapes were composed of two equal pairs, and so I circled the 6 which I thought could be split into two equal parts. I started with the ones with no extra blocks in between, but after about 3 circles, I realized the others with equal halves all had one extra block in the center. So then I circled those too. I checked to see if the halves were mirrored, and if so, I did not circle them.

Here's my roommates sheet. As you can see, he paired up the different shapes, but he did so by looking to see if the elements (halves) were similar, instead of the shape as a whole. He didn't try to mentally rotate the shape and compare them, as we learned the test required. In this way, both of us kind of failed miserably. The instructions were not clear, and the last part saying that "a shape from one pair doesn't appear in another" did not help at all.

Areas in the Big Square

This one was a lot more straightforward, and in the end, we both got the right answer. Above, you see my roomates work, where he separated the overlapping edges, and counted how many edges of the squares inside were visible. This method worked well for him, and he actually came up with the answer, that the blue and green circles have the same area, before me.

Here you can see mine, where I counted each section which was overlapped. I assigned sections overlapped by another color more "value" than ones overlapped by the same color, but counted both. Mine was not as visually apparent, because I had to think about it in numbers as opposed to shapes, but I came to the same conclusion. The irregular configuration also made it difficult to apply this strategy, as I found myself mixing up which number went with which color.