Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do people have dispositions towards visual or verbal think-ing styles, i.e., a tendency towards one default representationalmodality versus the other? The problem in trying to answerthis question is that visual/verbal thinking styles are challeng-ing to measure. Subjective, introspective measures are themost common but often show poor reliability and validity; neu-roimaging studies can provide objective evidence but are in-trusive and resource-intensive. In previous work, we observedthat in order for a purely behavioral testing method to be ableto objectively evaluate a person’s visual/verbal thinking style,1) the task must be solvable equally well using either visualor verbal mental representations, and 2) it must offer a sec-ondary behavioral marker, in addition to primary performancemeasures, that indicates which modality is being used. Wecollected four such tasks from the psychology literature andconducted a small pilot study with adult participants to see theextent to which visual/verbal thinking styles can be differenti-ated using an individual’s results on these tasks.