Imagery questionnaires: Vividness and beyond

Abstract

Most imagery questionnaires require ratings of the vividness of mental images. But vividness is only weakly related to theoretical models of imagery. In this chapter we review the usefulness of vividness ratings as an index of imagery ability. We contrast this with recent questionnaires that attempt to measure different components of imagery ability in terms of the underlying processes such as image generation, maintenance, inspection, and transformation or in terms of object versus spatial versus verbal cognitive processing styles. We show how these more theory-driven approaches can lead to new insights and argue that such approaches can and should be extended to mental imagery beyond the visual domain.