A New Test of Visual and Verbal Thinking

Science Center, Bent Corridor

This research investigates whether people show differences in recruiting visual or verbal mental representations when solving problems, and whether people’s subjective perceptions of their own representational biases reflect reality. We adapted four tasks from the literature that 1) can be solved equally well with either visual or verbal mental representations, and 2) contain some behavioral marker that indicates which type of representation is being used, independent of task performance levels. The four tasks are (1) a verification of the relationship between sentences and pictures, both of which encode spatial information, (2) an arithmetic task-switching task with visual and aural suppression, (3) a serial recall task in which the participant recalls sequences of digits with visual and aural suppression and (4) another serial recall task in which the participant must recall sequences of pictures that have visual or verbal similarities. We also gave participants two subjective, introspective questionnaires about mental representational style: the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) and the Visualizer-Verbalizer Questionnaire (VVQ). Analysis of results is ongoing.