Three facets of visual and verbal learners: Cognitive ability, cognitive style, and learning preference

The authors examined the hypothesis that some people are verbal learners and some people are visual learners. They presented a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the visualizer-verbalizer dimension to 95 college students and then conducted correlational and factor analyses. In a factor analysis, each measure loaded most heavily onto I of 4 factors: cognitive style (such as visual-verbal style questionnaires), learning preference (such as behavioral and rating instruments involving visual-verbal preferences in multimedia learning scenarios), spatial ability (such as visualization and spatial relations tests and verbal-spatial ability self-ratings), and general achievement (such as tests of verbal and mathematical achievement). Results have implications for how to conceptualize and measure individual differences in the visualizer-verbalizer dimension and cognitive style in general.