Visualization of compound scenes.

Subjects listened to descriptions of familiar objects and the spatial relations between them and attempted to visualize these objects as a composite scene. The time taken to generate a composite visual image, measured from the end of the verbal description, increased dramatically and linearly with the number of objects in the scene. As this relationship was independent of the rate of presentation of the verbal description, over a wide range, it could not be due to the visualization process cumulatively lagging behind the verbal description. Our evidence indicates that this relationship is due to some process, necessary to the subjective visualization of a composite array as a whole, which commences only after the verbal description is complete.