I think "visual-spatial learner" was a strongly suggested but an ultimately unfortunate label. Pattern vs. detail or abstract vs. concrete or intuiting vs. sensing or synthesis vs. analysis or even deductive vs. inductive are all likely to be more robust descriptions. The correspondence is that an image can encode patterns that can be easily detected by someone with those strengths; and there can be a large preference because if you can pick up information in a glance that might take ten minutes of someone explaining, it is pretty compelling.
However, it isn't a question of ability or preference, but a question of balance between the two sides and the abiliy to switch between detail and pattern oriented thinking.
DS8 learned whole words very young because he could remember the patterns of the letters at a glance and associate them to the word. The problem is it isn't phonetic, and it is a bit epic to undo what he did instinctually at two. You can strew things informally; such as we had CC (closed captioning) turned on the TV and that seems to have been a huge source for him, but I'm not sure now if it was a good idea with the degree of entrenchment we have.
