Perception, 2013, volume 42, pages 971 – 984 doi:10.1068/p7607 Relationships between visual figure discrimination, verbal abilities, and gender Valdar Tammik, Aaro Toomela Institute of Psychology, Tallinn University, Narva Road 29, 10120 Tallinn, Estonia; e-mail: valdar.tammik@tlu.ee Received 12 September 2013, in revised form 1 October 2013 Abstract. This study investigated the relationships between verbal thinking and performance on visual figure discrimination tasks from a Vygotskian perspective in a large varied adult sample (N = 428). A test designed to assess the structure of word meanings (ie tendency to think in ‘everyday’ or ‘scientific’ concepts as distinguished by Vygotsky) together with two contour picture tasks was presented. Visual tasks were a modified version of Poppelreuter’s overlapping figures and a picture depicting a meaningful scene. On both tasks concrete objects and abstract meaningless shapes had to be identified. In addition to relationships between visual task performance and word meaning structure, the effects of the meaningful scene and relations with gender were examined. The results confirmed the expected relation between word meaning structure and visual performance. Furthermore, they suggested a specific effect of the meaningful whole and a male advantage, especially for the first task in which women seemed to benefit less from advanced word meaning structure. Keywords: embedded figures, visual search, figure–ground discrimination, Vygotsky, word meaning structure, language, gender 1 Introduction One of the classical ways to assess visual abilities involves tasks where different contour drawings are either overlapping or embedded (hidden) in one another requiring so‑called figure–ground discrimination to recognise (find) them. The first type of these tasks can be traced back to the works of Poppelreuter (1917) and the latter one to the works of Gottschaldt (1926). Both are still used and studied today. The main difference between the tasks is that in the overlapping figures the contours are intersecting, whereas in the embedded figures the contours are shared (so that the contours making up a simpler figure form part of a complex one). Of these two tasks, the embedded (hidden) figures is clearly the more demanding one (Ghent 1956). Interestingly, most research using embedded figures has not investigated visual ability but cognitive styles—more specifically, field dependence–independence (Witkin et al 1977). Field dependence–independence refers to the extent to which individuals tend to perceive the surrounding (perceptual) field as a whole, so that the organisation of the field has a strong influence on their perception (field dependent); or analytically, seeing parts of the field as more separate from each other, enabling them to (re)organise the field according to their needs (field independent). The embedded figures test was used as one measure of field dependence–independence because it requires active restructuring of the visual field to overcome the organisation imposed by the complex figure. Although this cognitive‑style view of embedded figures performance has been repeatedly challenged (McKenna 1984; Miyake et al 2001; Rittschof 2010), the field dependence– independence tradition gave rise to an enormous amount of research related to the task. A portion of the findings accumulated over the years perhaps surprisingly suggests that the ability to solve the embedded figures is also related to some verbal abstraction abilities. Lefever and Ehri (1976), for example, found a relationship with the ability to identify multiple meanings from ambiguous sentences, and Longoni and Pizzamiglio (1981) found a