Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research on spatial thinking needs reliable and valid measures of individual differences in skills. Visuospatial Perspective Taking (PT)—the ability to mentally maintain and transform spatial relationships between objects within an environment—is one kind of spatial skill that is especially relevant to navigation and building cognitive maps. However, the psychometric properties of various PT tasks have yet to be examined. The present study examines three main psychometric properties of PT tasks: 1) the reliability of two tasks developed for children but adapted in difficulty level for use in adult populations, 2) item difficulty and discriminability within and between four tasks using item response theory, and 3) relation of scores with general intelligence, working memory, and mental rotation. Results showed that two of the four PT tasks have promising psychometric properties for measuring a wide range of PT ability based on item difficulty, discriminability, and efficiency of a test information function.