Students are presented with three figures, and must identify a characteristic or concept that they have in common. Based on that relationship, they pick another figure that belongs to that set from a separate group of figures. An example of a figure classification test question would be if the student was shown three irregularly shaped objects that were all black and had four sides. He must choose a matching object from another set of pictures including a black triangle, a black circle, a white object with four sides, a black object with four sides and a white object with six sides. The assessment lasts ten minutes, and contains 15 to 25 questions.
This portion of the CogAT doesn't require reading, and uses only geometric shapes and figures that provide visual, mental models that students with spatial skills prefer. The figure classification section does not require a large body of learned information, and may seem to some individuals to have little in common with formal educational instruction.
For these figure classifications, the student must see the object in his mind, and visualize how it would look from a different perspective. He forms a mental, visual image to solve the problem.
When a student employs inductive reasoning, such as for figure classification, she makes a generalization by inferences based on her sensory observations of things that can be seen or touched. From a collection of facts, patterns are identified and classified. Relationships between the facts (the "big picture"), are inferred by generalizing the patterns. The inference is subject to testing by further observation.