[3] An article in 1917 written by Alida Bowler talked about the picture arrangement test designed to measure logical judgments that was tried by Dr. O. Decroly with five hundred school children in Brussels.
Historical, the picture arrangement subsets of the Wechsler scales have been characterized repeatedly as being nonverbal and verbal measure of social competence.
[6] The PA subset includes "a set of colorful pictures, presented in a mixed-up order, which the child rearranges into a logical story sequence".
It is widely assumed that the PA subset measure a person's ability to evaluate and comprehend a situation using pictorial cues that have been visually organized.
When performance is poor, it is suspected that the client may have an impaired capacity to reflect, anticipate, and plan a course of action, and to understand antecedent and consequent events.
For example, it was common to attribute the high PA score found for adults diagnostically classified as narcissistic to their "Characteristically facile social anticipation".
Furthermore, adults with psychopathic character disorders frequently have a very high PA score, especially the "shrewd schemer" who can quickly evaluate a situation and manipulate it for his/her own end.
The PAT was inspired by The Thematic Apperception test and was developed to "maximize the ease of administration and the scoring at the least cost in richness of projective material".
The stories are like short comic strips and placing them in order relies on the individual's ability to recognize the cause and effect relationship of events depicted in the cards.