Functions of Visual Imagery in the Learning and Concept Formation of Children

64 elementary school children scoring in the upper and lower quartiles of their grades on tests of visual imagery were tested individually in an experimental situation simulating the learning of verbal labels. The high-imagery children were significantly superior to the low-imagery children (matched for sex, age, and IQ) in the initial learning of the names of objects; but the low-imagery children were significantly superior to the high-imagery children in grasping the concepts underlying a series of objects with the identical name. The low-imagery group also had a superior recall of objects with a given name, apparently as a function of their superior concept formation. Increasing age obliterated the discrepancy between the two imagery groups in concept formation but not in name learning.