Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the examples on the right side are not.
I stress though, I'm a big fan of these things and the innovations they have enabled, but you still have to understand that they are an axiomatic underpinning. It's like Euclid's parallel postulate in a way: There is non-euclidean geometry out there.
For example, in the second puzzle, the arrangement of black-and-white shapes is the same on the left and right pages, but the right page is rotated relative to the left page. Is the question about the shapes as in an ordered collection? Or is the question about the pages in their entirety? These problems tend to be underspecified, and end up being more of a guessing exercise about the authors intentions than anything else.
It still may not be a bad exercise (like art students at a gallery copying a master's work), but you shouldn't get too far ahead of yourself claiming it's some sort of 'exercise in pure reason'.
That's not to say there isn't value in learning this way of thinking, it's gotten society a long way.
"""
Analytic cognition is characterized by taxonomic and rule-based categorization of objects, a narrow focus in visual attention, dispositional bias in causal attribution, and the use of formal logic in reasoning. In contrast, holistic cognition is characterized by thematic and family-resemblance-based categorization of objects, a focus on contextual information and relationships in visual attention, an emphasis on situational causes in attribution, and dialecticism (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).
"""
This also comes up a lot in cognitive test design.
The anecdote I've always heard in reference to it was
""" What is considered wise in one society may not be considered wise in another; the value and meaning of intelligence depends on cultural norms. Demonstrating the culturally-specific nature of knowledge and intelligence, Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp (1971) conducted an experiment in which Western participants and Kpelle participants from Liberia were given an object-sorting task. Participants were asked to sort twenty objects that were divided evenly into the linguistic cat-egories of foods, implements, food containers, and clothing. Westerners tended to sort these objects into the groups for food and implements, while Liberian partici-pants would routinely pair a potato with a knife because, they reasoned, the knife is used to cut the potato. When questioned, Liberian participants justified their pairings by stating that a wise person would group the items in this way. When the researchers asked them to show what an unwise person would do, they did the taxonomic sort that is more familiar to the Western culture. """
quoted from https://uscaseps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/standardized...
A few of the examples from the article actually are similar. The two circles where one circle is either clockwise or counterclockwise from the nearest indention only admits pictures with two circles, one on the surface of the other and an indentation. There are images which wouldn't fit into either.
A math professor of mine was illustrating this point with number series (of the sort on aptitude tests, eg squares,arithmetic sequences, etc), by listing an obvious sequences whose completion ended up being an obscure function which diverged at the next point.
So, the trivial solution (and the more ultra-complicated solution) is defective basically because it's not interesting under the rules of the game which assumes the answer is somehow interesting, but not impossible to guess.
(And it illustrates the point quite well, as that is indeed probably the simplest and most general rule you can find.)