| The first line of research focused on the design and validation of a new self-report instrument assessing individual differences in object imagery, spatial imagery, and verbal cognitive styles, the Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire, OSIVQ (Blajenkova, Kozhevnikov & Motes, 2006; Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, submitted), based on the new Object-Spatial-Verbal cognitive style theoretical model (originally proposed by Kozhevnikov et al., 2005). The results of Principal factor analyses revealed a clear factor structure, with distinct object, spatial and verbal factors. Furthermore, the Object, Spatial and Verbal scales were correlated with the criterion measures. Thus, across a series of studies, the OSIVQ demonstrated acceptable internal reliability as well as predictive validity. Further, research focused on validating this new cognitive style model that challenges traditional approaches to Visual-Verbal cognitive style as a unitary, bipolar dimension, and instead suggests a new three-dimensional cognitive style that distinguishes between Object Imagery, Spatial Imagery, and Verbal dimensions. The current research provides further validation of the new Object-Spatial-Verbal cognitive style model, and investigates the relationships between all three of its dimensions. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the overall fit to the data of the new three-dimensional model of cognitive style was significantly better than that of the traditional, two-dimensional Visual-Verbal model. Thus, the current research supports the theoretical value of the new Object-Spatial-Verbal cognitive style model as well as the validity of the measurement approach based on this theory.;The second line of research focused ecological validation of the new cognitive style model and object-spatial distinction in visual imagery. In particular, it validated the new cognitive style assessment instrument, the OSIVQ, by establishing the relationship between the Object, Spatial and Verbal scales and learning and professional interests in the fields of visual art, science and humanities, correspondingly. Furthermore, this line of research investigates the object and spatial imagery preferences and abilities in members of different professions. The studies include behavioral paper-and-pencil and computerized testing. In the behavioral testing study (Blajenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2005), visual artists, scientists, architects, and humanities professionals completed spatial imagery tests, assessing the ability to process spatial relations and perform spatial transformations, and object imagery tests, assessing the ability to process literal appearances of objects in terms of colour and shape. A clear distinction was found: visual artists showed above average object imagery abilities but below average spatial imagery abilities. In contrast, scientists showed above average spatial imagery abilities but below average object imagery abilities. Thus, visual artists tended to be object imagers, and scientists tended to be spatial imagers. In addition, three groups of children (10–16 years old), those with interests and outstanding abilities in the fields of natural science, visual art, generally gifted children, as well as children without any specialized interests, were compared on a battery of spatial and object imagery tests. Overall, the results were consistent with those obtained from adult professionals, supporting the dissociation between object and spatial imagery abilities.;Furthermore, we explored the qualitative differences between visual artists and scientists in approaches to interpreting abstract visual information, i.e., kinematics graphs and abstract art. Overall, the results showed that object and spatial visualizers tended to interpret abstract visual information (i.e., abstract art and kinematics graphs) in qualitatively different ways. Visual artists tended to interpret the abstract art as abstract representations, but scientists tended to interpret abstract art literally, in a concrete way. In contrast, visual artists tended to interpret graphs literally (graphs-as-pictures), but scientists tended to interpret graphs schematically, in an abstract way. Thus, the results demonstrated that object visualizers (visual artists) were indeed able to form abstract representations in object visual thinking, contrary to the view that object imagery is a concrete type of imagery that cannot support abstract visual representations. Moreover, the results showed that spatial visualizers (scientists) failed to form abstract representations in non-spatial domain, which suggests that abstract reasoning ability can not be considered as an inseparable property of spatial imagery. Furthermore, these results suggest that, overall, abstract thinking is domain specific (i.e., object or spatial), and each mode of processing can support abstract representations. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
