In an instructional message the contextual dominance is most often conveyed in the form of printed or spoken sentences. Within any sentence used in conjunction with a picture are nouns or phrases that directly relate to contextual elements within the picture. These are called referents since they refer to objects perceptible in the picture. This study varied the dominance of referents used in a number of sentences and compared the patterns of subsequent observations of 15 pictures. The goal was to identify structural and/or contextual elements that stimulated consistent patterns of observation. Subjects were 21 students in a graduate class in research design at Indiana University. Thirteen subjects across 2 experimental groups received events with the same sequence of images, the verbal context being the only difference between groups. The other eight subjects made up a third control group exposed to images only. The study illustrated that when the structural dominance of an image is strong, an individual viewing this image will initially attend to the elements contributing to structural strength rather than to those which are contextual. (Contains 143 references.) (AEF)