Does processing style affect recall of the Rey-Osterrieth or Taylor complex figures?

This study investigated the effects of visual vs. verbal processing style preferences on immediate recall accuracy for the Rey-Osterrieth and Taylor Complex Figure Tests. Undergraduates were classified as visualizers or verbalizers and asked to copy either the Rey-Osterrieth or Taylor figure and then draw it from memory. A subset of subjects reported the strategy they used to reproduce the figure. Visualizers showed better reproduction accuracy than verbalizers for the Rey-Osterrieth test, and for this test approximately 80% of verbalizers as well as visualizers reported using a visual strategy. For the Taylor, no effect of processing style was obtained, and close to half of the verbalizers (43%) reported using their preferred verbal strategy, while 82% of the visualizers used a visual strategy. These results suggest that a general preference for thinking "in images" is important for predicting visual memory accuracy only on tests such as the Rey-Osterrieth which do not lend themselves easily to a verbal strategy. In contrast, for the Taylor test, deficits to the visual imagery system may be circumvented and obscured by the verbalizers' use of verbal recall strategies. Thus, in test batteries, the Rey-Osterrieth and the Taylor Tests should not be used interchangeably.