The Neural Correlates of Visual and Verbal Cognitive Styles

It has long been thought that propensities for visual or verbal learning styles influence how children acquire knowledge successfully and how adults reason in everyday life. There is no direct evidence to date, however, linking these cognitive styles to specific neural systems. In the present study, visual and verbal cognitive styles are measured by self-report survey, and cognitive abilities are measured by scored tests of visual and verbal skills. Specifically, we administered the Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire (VVQ) and modality-specific subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) to 18 subjects who subsequently participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. During the imaging session, participants performed a novel psychological task involving both word-based and picture-based feature matching conditions that was designed to permit the use of either a visual or a verbal processing style during all conditions of the task. Results demonstrated a pattern of activity in modality-specific cortex that distinguished visual from verbal cognitive styles. During the word-based condition, activity in a functionally defined brain region that responded to viewing pictorial stimuli (fusiform gyrus) correlated with self-reported visualizer ratings on the VVQ. In contrast, activity in a phonologically related brain region (supramarginal gyrus) correlated with the verbalizer dimension of the VVQ during the picture-based condition. Scores from the WAIS subtests did not reliably correlate with brain activity in either of these regions. These findings suggest that modality-specific cortical activity underlies processing in visual and verbal cognitive styles.