What a great question to explore! My DD and I have had a similar conversation when we've encountered questions like, "do you think in pictures or words". She would say she thinks in pictures, I would say I think in words. However, we are both avid readers who quickly become lost in our books and re-read favorites to revisit old friends--and by that I mean the actual characters as much as I mean the books
. I would say that we both experience the books as if we are a part of the book. My guess is DD could draw pictures of the characters from the pictures she thinks in, whereas I could not. I must "see" it as I'm reading it in order to feel I'm living it, but whatever visual images I form don't remain with me afterwards. Does that make sense? I'm definitely not spatial, whereas she might be. My hypothesis would be that auditory/verbal/visual/spatial factors don't determine the ability to become lost in a book, but probably do encode the information/experience differently for us in terms of what we experience when we *remember* a book.
I've seen students hang on every word of a read aloud despite being disinterested independent readers. Not sure where that figures into the whole question.....
