Visual and Spatial Representations in Relational Reasoning

Psychologists have argued that visual imagery plays a vital role in human reasoning. If so, then reasoning with materials that are easy to visualize should be better than reasoning with materials that are hard to visualize. The literature, however, reports inconsistent results. Our starting point was that the inconsistencies arise from confounding imageability with the spatial nature of the materials. Hence, we manipulated the ease of envisaging the materials as visual images and also as spatial layouts. An experiment showed that materials that are easy to visualize impair reasoning unless they are also easy to envisage spatially.