Mental Folding Test for Children (MFTC)
FREE for use with an Inquisit Lab or Inquisit Web license.Background
Mental folding tasks are a variant of spatial reasoning tests. In contrast to mental rotation tasks that require the mental rotations of certain objects (such as 3D cube figures) or spatial reasoning tasks involving humanoid figures (such as the Little Man Task), mental folding tasks focus on a person’s ability to mentally transform objects (e.g. a piece of paper) with varying complexity and to predict/recognize the outcome of such a transformation. For example, people might be asked how a folded piece of paper with several punch holes looks once it is unfolded. Justin Harris and colleagues introduced a child friendly version, the Mental Folding Test for Children (MFTC), in 2013.
Task Procedure
After learning about mentally folding a piece of a paper that is green on the front and purple on the back, a participant works on a sequence of problems, each showing a green piece of paper that needs to be folded a certain way: A dotted line indicates the folding axis, and an arrow shows the direction and distance of the intended fold. Four different response options on the bottom of the screen depict possible solutions showing different pieces of purple background with only one of them depicting the correct one. The participant is asked to click or touch the solution picture they think would result from the mental folding action.
What it Measures
The MFTC is a cognitive assessment tool of spatial reasoning abilities in young children
Psychological domains
- General Intelligence: Ability to learn from experience, adapt to new environments, and apply knowledge to solve problems
- Spatial Reasoning: Ability to mentally visualize, organize, and transform objects
- Visuospatial Working Memory: Temporary storage and active manipulation of visual and spatial information
Main Performance Metrics
- Accuracy: Number of correct (error) responses/Proportion Correct (Incorrect) Responses/ Percent Correct (incorrect) Responses
- Type of Error Responses: the number of selections of certain distractor categories
Psychiatric Conditions
The MFTC is mainly a research and diagnostic tool to evaluate spatial visualization abilities in young children, specifically those between the ages of 4 and 7
Available Test Variations
The mental paper folding task for children as developed by Harris, Hirsh-Pasek, & Newcombe (2013).
References
Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Mental Folding Test for Children (MFTC).
Harris, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Newcombe, N. S. (2013). A new twist on studying the development of dynamic spatial transformations: Mental paper folding in young children. Mind, Brain and Education, 7, 49-55.