be differentially affected by the perspective from which pictures of
the events are taken in much the same way they are affected by the
perspective from which descriptions of the events are written.
We investigated this possibility in Experiment 3. Stimulus
materials paralleled those used in the second experiment. However,
the events were conveyed in pictures rather than words. That
is, participants saw pictures of a man coming into a men’s room, a
man going into a men’s room, a woman coming into a ladies’ room,
and a woman going into a ladies’ room. We expected that response
times to the events would be an indication of the difficulty that
participants spontaneously encountered in comprehending them.
After viewing all of the pictures, however, participants reviewed
the pictures a second time and indicated how difficult it was to
imagine the events portrayed. These data served two purposes.
First, although the use of comprehension time as an indication of
comprehension difficulty is fairly common in both cognitive and
social psychology (Black et al., 1979; Radvansky & Zacks, 1991;
Wyer & Radvansky, 1999), it seemed desirable to confirm this
assumption in the present context.
Second, judgments of imagination difficulty provided indirect
evidence of the extent to which the style-of-processing measure
assessed differences in the disposition to form visual images rather
than in the ability to do so. Suppose verbal information processors
have less ability to construct visual images than visual processors
have. Then, they should report relatively greater difficulty in imagining
the situations described by the pictures than visualizers do
and this should be true regardless of the perspective from which
the pictures are taken. In contrast, suppose visualizers and verbalizers
are equally able to form visual images if they are explicitly
asked to do so. In this case, the difficulty they encounter in constructing
these images should be affected similarly by the nature
of the image they are asked to construct.