Spatial Reasoning and Mental Rotation
What is actually tested
Spatial items test your ability to hold a shape in mind and transform it. The main families are mental rotation (which option is the same object turned?), mirror versus rotation (which option is a reflection?), nets and folding (which cube results from this net?), paper folding and hole-punching (where do the holes appear when unfolded?), and block or cube counting.
The recurring traps
The classic error is accepting a mirror image as a rotation. This is easy to do with near-symmetric shapes, so use an asymmetric landmark. The second trap is assuming a fixed folding order on a net: check whether the answer depends on which face is treated as the base, and if it does, test the alternatives. The third is over-counting in block stacks - remember hidden cubes needed to support visible ones. The fourth is losing track during rotation and reversing the direction of turn; decide once whether you are rotating the object or your viewpoint, and stay consistent. The fifth is time bleed: candidates often over-invest in one hard rotation item and lose three easy ones.
Worked example
Take a square with a black dot in the top-left corner and a notch on the bottom edge. Rotating it 90 degrees clockwise moves the dot top-left to top-right and the notch bottom to left. If an option shows the dot top-right but the notch on the bottom, it is a reflection, not a rotation.
Rule of thumb
Choose one distinctive feature and track its clockwise order of neighbours - for example, dot, then notch, then plain corner. Rotation preserves that clockwise order; reflection reverses it. This single check resolves most mirror-versus-rotation questions in seconds.