“…The image-scanning paradigm offers a particularly useful way of finding out whether the scanning effect (i.e., the linear increase in scanning time with increasing distance) will also be detected after verbal descriptions of spatial configurations are processed in the absence of any prior visual contact with the corresponding visual layout. Several previous studies have reported evidence that spatial mental images constructed from verbal descriptions can indeed preserve metric information and, thus, achieve structural coherence that makes them similar to perception-based spatial images (e.g., Denis & Cocude, 1992;Denis, Gonçalves, & Memmi, 1995).…”