Middle-school students with low prior-knowledge in art studied a set of masterpiece paintings by visualizing a reproduction of the artwork (visual group), by being given a description of the artwork (verbal group), or both (dual group). Within each group, some students recreated the artwork from memory whereas others created a painting of their choice. The dual group outperformed the visual group on a retention test and recreated more elaborated visual elements from the masterpieces than the verbal and visual groups. Spatial ability predicted students' ability to recreate the masterpieces. The results support a two-stage information processing model of visual perception and cognition and suggest that verbal information can act as a substitute for prior knowledge in guiding students' processing of complex visual information.
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