“He that has an ill name is half-hanged”? Role of verbalization in unfolding of imagery representations of concrete and abstract concepts

Abstract

The  article  is  focused  on  one  of  the  central  issues  of  psychology  of  thinking  and  reasoning –the mechanism  of  verbal-imagery  conversion  underlying  the  distinction  between  essential  and  non-es-sential features of objects. It alsodescribes the role of verbalisation in unfolding of mental images of concrete and abstract concepts. The  following hypotheses  were  experimentally  tested:  1)  quality  of  verbal  definition  of  a  concept correlates positively with the quality of its mental image; 2) prior formulation ofverbal definition of a  concept  improves  the  quality  of  its  mental  image;  3)  numbers  of  essential  features  included  into both verbal and imagery representations differ between concrete and abstract concepts; 4) numbers of essential features included into representations of both concrete and abstract concepts depend on the  type  of  preceding  mental  activity  (verbalisation  or  depicting);  5)  numbers  of  essential  features included into both pictorial and verbal representations correlate with psychometric intelligence.The study comprised61 participants(42 females, mean age =20 years)assigned to one of the four groups (three experimental and one controlcondition) differingin types and numbers of experimental tasks. Participants  were administered J. Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test (which we used to control the level of psychometric intelligence) and either standard or modified version of “Picto-grams” test. The results showed that quality of imagery representations of concepts correlated positively with the quality of their verbal definitions; however, none of these variables was related to psychometric in-telligence. Even  though  the  second  hypothesis  of thestudy  was  not  confirmed,  verbalisation  was found to lead to representation of a larger number of essential features of concepts compared to de-picting. In addition, mental representations of abstract concepts appeared to include more essential features  than those  of  concrete  concepts. We  interpret  these  findings  as  the  evidence  for  integral mechanism of conceptual processing that contributes to the coordination of verbal and imagery pro-cesses. They might also highlight the lack of imagery skills in young adults due to ‘total visualisation’ of everyday cognitive and educational practices.