Mental Rotation Task

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So, I had to do this lab for one of my classes where I performed Shepard and Metzler's 'Mental Rotation Task.' While doing it, I found that I lacked the ability to picture and rotate these images in my mind. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't. Is this lack of ability to mentally form and rotate images typical of individuals on the spectrum?
Here's a link describing mental rotation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation

I don't think that the lack of ability to form and rotate mental images is typical of people on the spectrum. I think that some autistic people are good at visualization and mental rotation, and some autistic people are bad at visualization and mental rotation, and the same for NTs.

On WP, many people have said that they have bad visual-spatial skills, but many other people have said that they have good visual-spatial skills. It just depends on the person, I think.

People on the autistic spectrum tend towards extremes in ability and this is an example. Some are very visual and think almost entirely in pictures, others like me have virtually no visualization ability at all. I can do reasonably well on those mental rotation tests by using non-visual techniques, though it does slow me down somewhat.

I'm an extreme visual thinker and have no problems rotating objects in three dimensions in my mind. One of my stims/OCD habits is visualising three dimensional shapes such as cubes or even hypercubes and rotating them in my mind. Another habit is picturing thee dimensional wire frame objects and tracing along the edges trying to trace over all edges without crossing over the same edge more than once, or creating several such objects and merging them together in my mind to see the resulting 3D object - especially satisfying if they fit together and create a new smooth surfaced object. OK, just call me weird.

Tallyman, you're weird
I would love to have a skill like that. I have to do it the old fashioned way with pencil and paper or 3D cad.

Yeah, it's one of those things where aspies tend towards the extremes. I have almost no visual thinking ability. I can't figure 3D rotations out the majority of the time.

I don't know weather or not it's typical, but I do know that I don't have any ability whatsoever to form mental images. I have tried my whole life, and the best I could do was think about the color purple for about 20 min, and get a flash of color for about .0001 seconds. Everything runs through my head verbally, and I can intellectually understand what I'm "supposed to see" so I don't consider it a problem, but having someone tell me "picture this" or ask "did that fit the mental image you had?" is somewhat unnerving to me.