Bad at mental rotation

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I keep on getting bad scores on mental rotation tests and I don't know why. I don't notice any spatial problems in real life. I do get anxious when I get tested. I really hope it's just my anxiety. I really hope I don't have any visual-spatial deficits.

What's Mental Rotation?

kraftiekortie:
[I think that the answer is 3, but spatial rotation is definitely not my field of strength, lol].

DevilKisses:

Anxiety is often a cause of worse-than-expected performance on these types of assessments. If you are functioning well in your daily life, then there is no cause for concern--either there is no real deficit or you have already created ways to adapt to the deficits.

I wonder if the two-dimensional nature of the pictures, as opposed to the three dimensions of objects that one would typically need to mentally rotate in real life, also has something to do with performance on these assessments.

Tests like these have always infuriated me with their pointlessness.

I am decent at it, but it requires lots of concentration.

Did you ever take the WAIS-IV? I read somewhere that the WAIS-IV Visual Puzzles sub-test measures visual spatial reasoning, whole part integration, and mental rotation.

I can't do this. I find it painful and upsetting.

I think there's 2 possible answers, 1 and 3. I don't know if it's true, but I think you need to have good fine motor dexterity to be good at these questions.

I was wondering wth mental rotation was too! Finally had to see what the fuss was about.

Yea, I can't do them either. I was excellent in maths except for geometry. I was a total fail at that! LOL

I don't remember having any trouble in geometry.

Mental rotation is a skill I just plain don't have. I could never do it at all on tests and not in real life either.

Lack of mental rotation has had less impact on my life than dyscalcula but it has had impact. Where it seems to matter the most is in fixing things. This started to matter most once I got my own home and had to become competent at home maintenance and stuff assembly. Assembling a lawn mower or fixing a cabinet door becomes a lot harder when you can't mentally rotate things.

There are so many times when I had to unscrew and redo something that I had put on backwards or upside down. If you think mental rotation exists only on tests, buy some unassembled furniture from IKEA and you get a lesson in the purpose of mental rotation.

I think the answer is 1 but I am not good at this kind of thing either.

It looks like it's 1 to me, too.

I agree. But the figures are really badly drawn which makes it difficult to assert anything about them. They are probably a crude freehand attempt at isometric projection, but the lines are not parallel, so they fail in that regard. Neither is there any discernable 1, 2 or 3 point perspective system in operation.

From a very exacting viewpoint 1 is better that 3 because the angles seem to differ slightly in 3--but if those are meant to be cubic units, then the angles must all be right angles and 1 and 3 must be correct.

if we label the horizontal axis of the drawing plane as the x axis, the depth into the drawing plane as the Y axis and the vertical axis of the drawing plane as the Z axis and we label the original figure as 0 with the four possible matches as 1-4,

1 = 0 rotated 180 degrees around the Z axis.
2 is a reflection of 0, therefore not a match
3 = 0 rotated 90 degrees around the Z axis.
4 is constructed of a different number of cubic units and therefore not a match.

I'm very strong when it comes to visual spatial work. Top of my class in drafting in university. It's probably my greatest stength - I really do think in pictures.

I found it easy. 1 and 3 both match but the question implies that there is only one match.
"which of the shapes below is a rotated version". Otherwise it would have asked "which of the shapes below are rotated versions".
"exact shape above shape" doesn't exactly make sense either.

When I first looked at the puzzle, I randomly "mentally rotated" 3 first and stopped. As it looked "good enough". This is what I do on these type of tests (as often times there is a time limit involved). In any event, as I look at these more closely and you are correct, 1 is the better match. As the angle in 3 seems a bit off. It does not look like a right angle.



I think mental rotation helps in both designing and building things. I cannot see how someone can do, say, landscape design without being able to mentally rotate things such as elevation.