Porteus Maze Test: Non-verbal planning test

About the Porteus Maze Test

Stanley Porteus arrived at the Vineland Training School in 1915 to work on cognitive assessment of children with intellectual disabilities. Goddard's translation of the Binet-Simon scale was already in use at Vineland, but Goddard and others felt it underestimated the children's practical abilities. Porteus's solution was a non-verbal test that required no spoken or written language: a series of printed mazes of increasing complexity.

The Porteus Maze Test contained 12 mazes ranging from very simple (year 3 difficulty) to very hard (adult difficulty). The subject traced a path from entrance to exit without crossing any walls or backing up. Scoring was based on the highest maze successfully completed within reasonable time limits. The test measured planning, foresight, motor control, and impulse inhibition.

The Porteus Maze Test was widely incorporated into other batteries: it appeared in the Army Beta (1918) as Test 1, in the Pintner Non-Language Mental Test (1920), and in numerous clinical batteries through the 1960s. It is still occasionally used in modern neuropsychology, particularly for assessing executive function in children and patients with frontal-lobe damage.

The 1 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Porteus, S. D. (1915). Mental tests for feeble-minded: A new series. Journal of Psycho-Asthenics, 19(4), 200-213.

Public domain. Stanley Porteus (1883-1972) was an Australian-trained psychologist who joined the Vineland Training School (the same institution where Henry Goddard had translated the Binet-Simon scale). The Maze Test was later widely used in clinical neuropsychology under the names Porteus Maze and (more recently) the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test as a measure of executive function. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/porteusmazetesti0000stan.