SBIR Phase I:Coding the Affective Domain and Visuospatial Ability

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project supports the development of a visuospatial educational assessment tool.Visuospatial aptitude is a facet of intelligence that underlies innovative thinking, i.e., how do new ideas emerge? and What are the physiological processes involved? Today, there is an overwhelming exposure within society to digital visual stimuli and national assessment authorities acknowledge visuospatial abstract reasoning as an accepted and sought after cognitive ability. Future curriculum designs must develop along with how people are changing and perceiving knowledge. This project seeks to set standards in education on visuospatial ability by introducing a novel assessment. This visuospatial assessment tool will utilize a software platform that allows customers to take the assessment online, and has commercial potential to improve industry, science, and educational programs for the advancement of human communication.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project investigates the development of an information technology consisting of a visuospatial ability assessment for measuring the biological processes that are required for being creative. Humans are biologically predisposed both to perceive and to reproduce symmetry, mainly in visual form, but also aurally; This proposed visuospatial assessment tool measures some of the biological processes that are required for the perception and reproduction of symmetry. Specifically, this assessment measures a form of sensorimotor perceptual action referred to in this project as ‘affective symmetry gauging’ (ASG). ASG consists of a subject’s innate visual perception/identification of the division in extreme and mean ratio point (DEMR; i.e., the symmetry point) in a given pattern. Because this process measures the extent to which a subject can perceive/identify and reproduce the symmetry point in given patterns, the tool also suggests the degree to which a subject may be inclined to reproduce symmetry, marking this inclination as a natural human expression of creativity aligned to pleasingness.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.