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Visual Learners See Words

Visual Learners Convert Words To Pictures In The Brain And Vice Versa, Says Psychology Study

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2009)

A University of Pennsylvania psychology study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brain, reveals that people who consider themselves visual learners, as opposed to verbal learners, have a tendency to convert linguistically presented information into a visual mental representation.

The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the visual cortex when reading words.
The opposite also appears to be true from the study’s results.

Those participants who considered themselves verbal learners were found under fMRI to have brain activity in a region associated with phonological cognition when faced with a picture, suggesting they have a tendency to convert pictorial information into linguistic representations

The study was recently presented at the 16th Annual Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting.
Future research based on the findings from this study may be able to determine whether cognitive styles are something one is predisposed to or can learn. Depending on the flexibility with which one can adopt a style, educators could cater to one style over another to improve learning.