Does relocating information in text depend on verbal or visuospatial abilities? An individual-differences analysis.

In this individual-differences study, we evaluated the prevalent view that relocating information in a previously read text depends primarily on visuospatial abilities. Participants read a text, answered fill-in-the-blank test questions, and identified which page and line in the original text contained the sentence in each question. They also completed a battery of verbal and visuospatial tasks. Performance on verbal tasks was highly predictive of the accuracy of both page and line identifications, and this correlation remained significant even after we controlled for performance on visuospatial tasks. In contrast, performance on visuospatial tasks was not predictive of either page or line identification accuracy, once verbal abilities were controlled for. These results suggest an important role for verbal abilities in relocation of text information and a lesser role for visuospatial abilities than has previously been assumed.