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Mental Rotation

Mental Rotation

Two block figures. Is the second one the first turned in space, or its mirror image? A classic spatial-reasoning test.

How to play

Each round shows two figures built from cubes, one above the other. The lower figure is either the upper one rotated in three dimensions, or the upper one reflected and then rotated. Decide which and tap SAME or MIRRORED before the bar empties; running out of time counts as a wrong answer. A reflected figure can never be rotated back into the original, so there is always exactly one right answer — figures whose mirror image happens to be reachable by rotation would be unanswerable, and every one of those is filtered out before it reaches you. Each correct answer makes the next figure longer, widens the rotation between the two views and shortens the clock. Three wrong answers end the run, and your score is the number you got right.

Tips & strategy

Do not try to rotate the whole figure. Find one distinctive feature and follow only that. The best feature is usually the shortest arm, or the single end cube that sticks out alone: locate it in both pictures, work out which way it points relative to the long body, and the answer often falls out without any rotating at all.

The reliable trick is handedness. Pick the corner where two arms meet, point your fingers along one arm and your thumb along the other, and see which hand it takes. Do it for both figures. Same hand means same object; different hands means mirrored. This works no matter how the figure has been turned, and it is the only method that stays fast as the figures get longer, because it needs one corner rather than the whole shape.

When the two views are almost the same, be suspicious rather than relieved. A small rotation makes a mirrored figure look very like the original, and that is exactly where people answer SAME on reflex. Conversely a near-180° turn looks alien and tempts a MIRRORED answer that is often wrong. The apparent strangeness of a figure tells you about the size of the rotation, not about the answer.

Work from the middle out, not from an end. The two figures are drawn in different orientations, so matching end cubes is guesswork, but the long central arm is easy to identify in both. Anchor on it first, then check how the two shorter arms hang off it. Counting cubes is worth doing only as a last check — the figures always have the same number, so it never distinguishes anything by itself.