How do you measure something you can't see? Tools like the PSIQ and other imagery questionnaires let researchers quantify vividness and study it at scale.
Cumming and Eaves · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
Mental imagery is a multidimensional process involving image generation, inspection, transformation, and maintenance. Understanding these distinct components allows for more precise measurement and application of imagery in sport and health settings.
Cabrera and colleagues · International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research
The Body Perception Questionnaire-Short Form (BPQ-SF) demonstrated consistent factor structure and high reliability across diverse cultural and demographic samples. This validates the tool as a robust measure for assessing interoception and autonomic reactivity.
Reeder · Vision Research
Researchers found that individual differences in imagery vividness, precision, and expertise significantly shape the content of mental representations. This highlights the need to account for personal variation in vision research.
Keogh and Pearson · Cognition
Visual mental imagery is severely limited by a bottleneck in representational capacity, with image precision and strength declining as more items are imagined. This suggests that the anatomical architecture of the visual cortex imposes fundamental constraints on human thought.
Maxwell, Lynn and Lilienfeld · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
Lower mental imagery use and vividness were found to be significant predictors of psychopathic traits and coldheartedness. This suggests that deficits in mental imagery may play a role in the emotional and interpersonal impairments seen in psychopathy.
Berger and Ehrsson · Scientific Reports
Imagining collision-like sounds can cause people to perceive crossing discs as bouncing, with the effect's strength tied to imagery vividness. This demonstrates that mental imagery can integrate with real sensory input to alter our perception.
Pearson and Westbrook · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Researchers propose a dichotomous framework for phantom perception, distinguishing between voluntary mental imagery and involuntary experiences like illusions or synesthesia. This classification helps unify diverse sensory phenomena and provides a roadmap for studying the neural mechanisms of constructive perception.
Andrade and colleagues · British Journal of Psychology
A new questionnaire on imagery in seven senses found a separate vividness factor for each sense rather than one general factor, though the senses correlate. Relative to their own average, most people were stronger in some senses than others.
Pearson · Current Directions in Psychological Science
Mental imagery and visual working memory involve overlapping sensory representations in the early visual cortex. This suggests that voluntary imagery literally takes on a pictorial format of visual information within the brain.
Laeng and Sulutvedt · Psychological Science
Pupils narrowed when people imagined bright shapes or scenes and widened for dark ones, even while they looked at a plain gray screen. The authors conclude that mental images carry the brightness of the original perception.
Nelis and colleagues · Psychologica Belgica
Researchers validated the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale as a reliable measure of the tendency to use visual imagery in daily life. This allows researchers to study the frequency of imagery use as a distinct cognitive trait from vividness.
Arshamian and Larsson · Frontiers in Psychology
Olfactory imagery shares many features with visual and auditory modalities, yet most people struggle to recreate smells mentally. This highlights significant individual variation and suggests that olfactory imagery is uniquely difficult to access.
Rademaker and Pearson · Frontiers in Psychology
Researchers found that five days of mental imagery training improved participants' metacognitive accuracy but did not increase imagery strength. This suggests that introspective ability and imagery production rely on distinct neural mechanisms.
Anema and colleagues · Experimental Brain Research
Tactile imagery specifically facilitates the processing of real tactile stimuli but not auditory ones. This suggests that mental imagery and real perception share modality-specific neural representations.
Keogh and Pearson · PLoS ONE
Strong mental imagery improves visual working memory performance, but individuals with poor imagery still perform well using non-visual strategies. This suggests that mental imagery is a helpful but non-essential component of visual working memory.
Pearson, Rademaker and Tong · Psychological Science
Subjective vividness ratings reliably predict an image's impact on subsequent perception. This suggests that individuals have accurate metacognitive insight into the sensory strength of their mental imagery.
Campos · Perceptual and Motor Skills
The VVIQ-RV and VVIQ-2 show high internal consistency and strong construct validity for measuring object mental imagery. This confirms both revised versions are equally valid psychometric tools for assessing individual differences in imagery vividness.
Pearson, Clifford and Tong · Current Biology
Imagining a specific pattern can strongly bias which of two competing stimuli reach awareness during binocular rivalry. This demonstrates that mental imagery creates a short-term sensory trace that directly shapes subsequent conscious perception.
Cui and colleagues · Vision Research
Subjective vividness of mental imagery correlates with objective early visual cortex activity and performance on a psychophysical task. This demonstrates that individual differences in imagery can be quantified through neuroimaging and behavioral measures rather than just self-report.
Stevenson and Case · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Researchers found that olfactory imagery follows the same psychophysical laws and neural processes as actual odor perception. This suggests that the capacity for mental smell is as robust as other imagery modalities despite common difficulties in verbalizing it.