A study was conducted as part of a program to develop and test an individual level communications model. The model proposes that audience members bring to communications situations a set of learned cognitive processing strategies that produce cognitive structural representations of information in memory to facilitate the meeting of the various goals or needs that motivate media exposure. Among these strategies are imagery usage, total or partial avoidance, cross-contextual recoding, making inferences, active repetition, and memorizing. The model also proposes that an individual's exposure goals in a given situation may delineate task constraints on the cognitive processing system. In the study, 115 college students indicated that suggestion and environmental reinforcement were not strong enough to induce reliably the uses and gratifications orientations of surveillance, diversion, and anticipated communication in a laboratory setting. Self-reported use of imagery related positively to cognitive differentiation and negatively to subjects' thinking about other matters while reading, supporting a central assumption in the model that imagery strategy is resource and detail intensive. (FL)