Can people with Aphantasia perform item rotation/manipulation tasks?

I just yesterday discovered that I am on an aphantasia spectrum so I am still discovering what it means for me. I have almost no mental images though not zero.

I can perform rotation task better than an average person (high score in tests) but I don't do it through rotating image, that's impossible for me. The easiest way for me is usually just seeing patterns and noticing correlations between elements of an object. I can do that quickly enough and very accurately.

When I took an IQ test based on rotating object tasks, I scored high. I had a similar, but a bit lower result in an official IQ test done with a psychologist, which I had a few times in my life (in my country I had to do it on every level of my education to get and keep my dyslexia certificate). The latter had various types of tasks. One task was to look at some image for a short time and then draw it from memory. I was trying to quickly analyse the image, make a description in my head (otherwise I would remember only that I saw some pictures with lines and geometrical figures), but there was not enough time. After drawing from memory I had to do few other tasks and then draw from memory again. I had no mental image and at that point I vaguely remembered my incomplete description so I was dreadful. In this test I lost most of the points on this task and on questions about pop culture (I guess it was about long term memory, they wrongly assumed that everyone watches popular movies, read magazines, talk with friends about famous actors etc).

Another way of dealing with rotating object tasks is to do it through a movement of my hand. I don't see much visually in my head but I can decide that for example my thumb represents one side of the drawn object, the second joint of my index finger represents another side of the object. I can rotate my hand, see where my thumb, index finger etc. are after the rotation, and based on it know where elements of an object would end up if they rotated in a similar way to my hand.

I fiercely hated these questions in school ... they always took 2-3 times longer than I felt the should and involved drawing the image in varying states to work it out.

Given time and enough info, I can usually work it out, Knowing there's a word for it makes me feel better about having to work so hard for it.

"Estimating distances, angles, or lengths without physically seeing them"
Errr no... well.. depends.. like I know that my coffee table is 1.5meter square.. so if I was shopping for a table cloth and it said it was it was a runner that was 1meter wide and 2meters long. I would know in my head thats 25cm each side and 25cm hanging off...but I can not picture what that looks like..
I can not estimate to tell you how long my drive way, if I was standing there looking at it.. I could...

I approach these problems through pattern recognition. This method works well for me, but in IQ tests, my scores were lower because of the time limit. It takes more time to logically process the patterns than to simply "visualize" them, even though the result is just as accurate.

There was some early research with Patient MX that showed aphantasics actually performed similar or better at controls on mental rotation tasks. Here's an older article about it with mental rotation examples for anyone who wants to give it a try and compare notes! https://aphantasia.com/article/science/mental-rotation-tasks (opens in a new tab)

Because I study computers, this is not really a problem as I turn the visual problem into a coordinate geometrical one.
Just mapping each coordinate to a number and than thinking about the rotational transformations of the numbers is enough for me to figure out, since the wrong answer has no such transformation.

Mental rotation is trivial for me.

I just "know" it, even though I can't see anything but black in my mind's eye.

For example, on the IQ tests which ask you to determine which rotated figure matches the example, I don't even have to look at all the possible solutions. I just know which one is correct, in a fraction of a second. It's not just guessing, because my scores were very high. Also, with jigsaw puzzle pieces, I often just know where a piece goes; not only that, but my fingers can rotate the piece to fit the hole without any conscience thought. I just pick up the piece, and it just fits into place.

I'm also good at "cube net" problems and can easily lay out a flat arrangement of polygons which will fold up into the desired shape.

I'm not particularly good at estimating distances, but I can accurately find the center point of distances from inches up to 10 feet or so. I'm fairly good at estimating angles.

For a recent programing project, I had to create line segments to form characters (letters, numbers, and symbols). I had to trace out the first few on paper, but I was able to do the rest without any sketches. Also, due to my desire to minimize the numeric notation, I directly entered the coordinate values in base-36 arithmetic. Here's an example:

case 'A': pts = "0A,6S,CA;3H,9H"; break;
case 'B': pts = "0A,0S,8S,CP,CM,8J,CG,CD,9A,0A;0J,9J"; break;
case 'C': pts = "CD,9A,3A,0D,0P,3S,9S,CP"; break;

How can I do that so easily? I have no idea.