Children Who Cannot Imagine

Children Who Cannot Imagine

19 low spatial, high verbal intelligence, fourth- and sixth-graders, were compared to controls matched for verbal intelligence, age, sex and grade, in a battery of visual mental imagery and verbal tasks. The imagery tasks tested the processes of image generation (the span of to-be-generated images), image integration (the use of interactive imagery instructions), image inspection (the repeated scanning of a mental image), image transformation (mental subtraction). The verbal tasks contained a digit span, an associated-abstract words recall task and a sentence scanning task. We observed that the low spatial, high verbal intelligence children rendered a poorer performance in all the visual mental imagery tasks, but not in the verbal ones. Between the imagery tasks, only the image generation one produced a significant age effect. The results were examined with reference to the connection between spatial ability and a specific ability to generate and process mental images.