IS VISUAL THINKING 'IMAGELESS THOUGHT'?

Abstract

Two measures of visual problem-solving ability and two measures of visual-imaging ability were administered to 99 subjects. Scores on the Emergent Patterns Test, a problem-solving test which requires subjects to think about specific combinations of visual icons and to identify the emergent patterns, did not correlate significantly with scores on either the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or the Brightness of Visual Imagery Measure. Scores on the Block Visualization Test, which requires subjects to think about blocks being painted and diced and to answer questions about the resulting pieces of block, did not correlate significantly with the scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and correlated negatively with the scores on the Brightness of Visual Imagery Measure. The three nonsignificant correlations support nineteenth-century arguments that vivid imagers tend to construct sensory representations of unconscious visual thoughts, whereas “imageless thinkers” tend not to. The one negative correlation further may suggest that the conscious construction of visual imagery can sometimes interfere with the underlying processes of unconscious visual thinking.