Visual and verbal processing strategies in comprehension and judgment

The information we receive in the course of daily life experience is often transmitted both verbally and visually. Two different processing strategies are postulated to underlie the integration of this information, the activation of which may be influenced by (a) chronic individual differences in the disposition to process information visually vs. verbally, (b) situational factors that influence the relative accessibility of these strategies in memory, and (c) characteristics of the information to be processed. Research in both social and consumer psychology is discussed in terms of the conceptual framework we propose.