A Study On How Visual Imagery Affects Transitive Inference

Visual imagery plays an important role in human cognitive and thinking activity, but its role in transitive inference reasoning is still equivocal and controversial.In the study we designed experiments by evaluating subjects' vividness of visual imagery with VVIQ (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaires) and distinguishing word relation between ease of visualization and ease of constructing spatial imagery. The subjects in the experiments are university students. The results of experiments are demonstrated as following:1. With the increasing of the number of logical items and the increasing difficulty of problems , the effect of vividness of imagery on reasoning will change from facilitating to impeding .2. Spatial imagery can promote the process of reasoning whereas visual imagery can impede the process, because irrelevant visual detail can be a nuisance in reasoning.