Pictorial Reasoning
What you must know
Picture items ask you to compare drawings of real objects and detect a rule: picture analogies (A is to B as C is to ?), picture classification, and picture series (what comes next). The features that can change are a short, finite list: how many objects appear, their size, their position on the page, their orientation (facing left or right), their color or shading, and whether an object is added or removed. Your task is to name the feature that changes and the direction of the change.
Traps
- Two features change at once, and a distractor matches only one of them.
- A distractor that is mirrored rather than rotated - easy to miss on symmetrical objects.
- Counting errors: a picture with four items when the rule calls for five.
- Series that alternate (A, B, A, B) rather than progress steadily.
Rule of thumb
Convert the picture into a sentence: "The arrow grows larger and turns one quarter clockwise each step." Then apply that same sentence to every answer choice and discard anything that violates either half of it. If two rules seem possible, keep the one that accounts for every frame without exception.
Worked example: The frames show a single star moving along the top of the box from left to right, then down the right side. The rule is "move one side clockwise per frame," so the next frame places the star at the bottom - not at the top-left, which would be a reversal.