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"Spatial ability: Its unique role in creativity and technical innovation"

Authors: Harrison J. Kell, David Lubinski, Camilla P. Benbow, & James H. Steiger

In the late 1970s, 563 intellectually talented 13-year-olds (identified by the SAT as in the top 0.5% of ability), were assessed on spatial ability. Over 30 years later, their peer-reviewed publications and their patents were each classified into three groups. Spatial ability added incremental validity to the differential prediction of these accomplishments, beyond the SAT's mathematical and verbal reasoning subtests. Findings support spatial abilityís unique role in the development of creativity, relative to traditional measures used in educational selection, counseling, and industrial-organizational psychology. In addition to modeling creativity and tracking intellectually talented youth over the lifespan, these findings reinforce prior evidence suggesting that assessing spatial ability is required for studying how intellectual development unfolds more generally. Spatial ability plays a key and unique role in structuring many important psychological phenomena, and warrants more widespread use across the applied and basic psychological sciences.