A test question from my childhood about eyelashes still confuses me

March 24, 2016 10:58 PM

The test was to determine whether I should be placed into a program for gifted students. I was five or six years old. One of the tasks was to identify the difference between a series of side-by-side photographs. For example, the picture on the left might be a tree with a rope swing, the picture on the right might be a tree with a tire swing. One of these side-by-sides was not like the others, and I can't figure out why it would be helpful in determining a child's aptitude.

The two pictures in question were line drawings of a woman's face. The difference was in her eyelashes. In one, it looked as though she had put on mascara. The eyelashes were fuller, thicker, and darker. The reason this question stands out nearly 25 years later is that, at the time, I did not know how to answer it. The rest of the test was fairly easy, though I struggled a little with the spatial reasoning blocks. I remember the verbal stuff being a cakewalk, and then there was this question. I knew that the eyes were different, but I had no concept of what mascara was or what makeup did. My mom and grandma only ever wore it on very special occasions, and I was forbidden from playing with it at such a young age. I think the answer I settled on was something along the lines of, "The eyelashes are bigger," but I didn't feel confident that that was the right answer. I still don't.

Having basically zero knowledge about early childhood education or aptitude testing, I would like to understand what that question hoped to reveal. Surely they weren't interested in whether or not I knew about makeup at that age? Did they want to see how I responded in the face of a question I had little chance of answering correctly? Do most five year old brains already contain the phrase "fuller, thicker lashes"?

posted by landunderwave to Education (10 answers total)

Maybe they wanted to know whether you could compare lines and tell which were thicker?
posted by lollusc at 11:06 PM on March 24, 2016

How did you know they were women's faces? My guess would be that the 'fuller, thicker lashes" was a female face and the other was a male face barring any other gender indication.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:07 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: A guess, using a generalization: when a neurotypical person looks at a face (or a picture of a face), they tend to focus primarily on key features: eyes, mouth, to a lesser extent nose. Some people on the autism spectrum don't do this as much: they look everywhere but don't necessarily focus on key facial features. By changing a small thing around the eyes they may have just been seeing how quickly you saw it. I highly doubt they were looking for specific language about the thickness of the lashes.
posted by brainmouse at 11:10 PM on March 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

Compared to the other test you describe, it sounds like the difference between the pictures was quite subtle. The test might have been designed to test your attention to detail (i.e., the 'wrong' answer might have been "there's no difference").
posted by girlgenius at 11:35 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I remember having to do something like this when I was in Kindergarten. I was brought to this weird mobile building with a psychologist in it, and I had to go there for a few months to do these tests.

One of the problems was about whether some invention would work, like a hat that had a parachute installed in it, and what would happen if somebody jumped off a building and tried to use it. I think the test was about how you reasoned about the problem, as opposed to the answer you came up with. I must've answered it correctly because they started skipping me grades after it.

Looking back on it the whole situation was weird, and I really wish somebody explained to me what the heck was going on. Frankly I would've preferred none of that happening at all because it set me apart from my friends in class.
posted by gehenna_lion at 11:45 PM on March 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: How did you know they were women's faces? My guess would be that the 'fuller, thicker lashes" was a female face and the other was a male face barring any other gender indication.

It's a fuzzy memory, and it's completely possible that I fabricated typically feminine details like fuller lips and long hair after the fact because I remembered it being a woman's face. If it was a gender neutral face, maybe they were testing whether I described it as "him" or "her". That's a possibility I hadn't considered.
posted by landunderwave at 12:06 AM on March 25, 2016

Best answer: Some of those types of questions can show different facets of a kid's aptitude depending on the answer, and there's sometimes a rubric to show gradations between "incorrect" and "what an adult could verbalize." In the tire vs. rope swing question, you could notice no difference, silently point to the difference, say "tires don't go on trees!", or say "that is a rope swing and that is a tire swing". Each one of those shows a different level of understanding of the pictures, social ability (to verbalize the difference), cultural knowledge (that tire swings exist; the words for those types of swings), and ability to take the relative abstraction of a 2D picture and apply it to your own experiences.

"The eyelashes are different" is a perfectly reasonable answer; it answers the question that was asked and shows that you have enough vocabulary to know what eyelashes are. Other kids might say one face was female but not know why, or the eyes were different but not be able to narrow down the difference, or not notice the difference at all, since that's a pretty subtle thing. I wouldn't expect most kids to be able to draw the conclusion that the thicker eyelashes were made with makeup, but a kid who did might score higher on some inference/cultural knowledge scale and depending on the culture where you took that test, it *could* be some cultural bias baked into the test.

(I'm going to test my local 5-year-old tonight on this, because I'm curious.)
posted by tchemgrrl at 5:40 AM on March 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

These tests are designed to be free of cultural biases, but they don't always achieve their goals. They may have assumed that the average five year old should be able to spot the difference of make-up. My son was asked to identify objects in pictures when he was five and, when shown a Christmas tree (which we never had, as we're Jewish), he identified it as simply a tree. When the examiner pressed for a fuller description, he offered "a GREEN tree?" The examiner concluded he had trouble with the s's in the word "Christmas".
posted by ubiquity at 7:01 AM on March 25, 2016 [9 favorites]

I took a similar test a couple of years older (second grade) and they explicitly mentioned that they didn't necessarily care if I got the answers correct, and would in fact be asking questions they expected me not to be able to answer, but still wished to hear whatever thoughts/reasonings I had about each. One question like that I remember very clearly asked how many centimeters were on a ruler (ruler not provided). There were also flash cards with questions that I much later learned could have been easily solved with algebra, but I had brute-forced. I think they had me compare geometric patterns, not scenes, but in any care the testers seemed to have a high degree of autonomy and I wouldn't expect that the exact word "mascara" would have been expected out of a young child unless it turned out that make-up was an area of expertise for that child.
posted by teremala at 1:57 PM on March 25, 2016

I think it was just a test of attention to fine detail and noticing facial features, not any expectation that you come up with a plausible scenario (i.e. makeup) as to why the eyelashes look different.

To compare it to the other example of a rope swing versus a tire swing: it's not as if you were expected to explain how someone would acquire a spare tire to use as a swing.
posted by desuetude at 2:25 PM on March 25, 2016