Concept Imagery and Cognition – No More IT
Meet Joe. “I can remember reading aloud in class and then not being able to answer the questions. Reading the words was no problem. (Shy smile.) But, then when I couldn’t answer the questions, the kids would laugh at me. (Looking down.) The worst was that I had a teacher in high school that continually called me stupid…maybe I am. (Long pause, brown eyes looking at me.) Am I?”
To this day my chest tightens remembering how Joe looked when he told that story. He was embarrassed and sensitive, and his problem with literacy wasn’t that he couldn’t decode the words, it was that he couldn’t comprehend the concepts. He could not get it, and telling him to “pay attention” or “think when you read” didn’t help him. It hurt him.
As Joe read or listened to language, he processed “parts”-the in-one-ear-and-out-the-other syndrome. He could sometimes remember a few details, but he couldn’t get the big picture. He had always had the problem, and it wasn’t just when he read. It was also when he tried to follow directions and could not remember all of them, and then got in trouble for not paying attention. It was when he tried to express himself, verbally or in writing, and it came out disjointed and out of sequence. It was when he listened to language, conversation or classroom presentations, and it went by him before he could get it. It was when he tried to participate in conversation and could not make salient points because he spoke to the “parts” he processed. It was when he tried to think critically or problem solve, a constant frustration for him. Though Joe could read and spell words, he had a language processing problem, and IT permeated the quality of his life and eroded his self-esteem.
Joe’s symptoms could be traced to his difficulty in getting the gestalt, the whole-necessary for processing language and thinking. Most importantly, his difficulty in getting the gestalt could be traced to his weakness in the sensory-cognitive function of concept imagery-the ability to visualize the whole.
Numerous years ago, while researching the relationship of imagery to comprehension and trying various steps to develop imagery, I discovered an interesting phenomena. It wasn’t that individuals couldn’t image, it was that they couldn’t image the gestalt. They could not connect the parts to form an imaged whole. Instead, they got “parts”-bits and pieces-and thus could not get the main idea, draw a conclusion, make an inference or evaluate.
