Spontaneous inferences from pictorially presented behaviors

Previous research on spontaneous trait inferences (STI) was based on verbal stimuli. In this research, stimulus behaviors were presented pictorially a nd STIs were measured in terms of the time needed to identify a trait term that gradually appeared behind a mask. An attempt was made to demonstrate t hat the STI cannot be reduced to a side effect of language comprehension. A pilot study showed that the phenomenon extends to Pictures and that a grap hical encoding task leads to even stronger STIs than verbal recoding, Exper iment 1 corroborated the basic finding using an improved methodology. In Ex periment 2 specific encoding operations were manipulated in a verification task. STIs were strongest when the verification task referred to concrete s timulus aspects. The findings support neither an account in terms of mere l anguage comprehension nor a verbal interference of inferential-distance acc ount, but they are consistent with a concreteness advantage or picture-supe riority effect.