Individual differences in visuo-spatial imagery: further evidence for the distinction between object and spatial imagers

Abstract

Background and aims Neuropsychological studies with brain damaged patients and neuroimaging studies with healthy subjects demonstrated that imagery is not a unified construct and distinct object and spatial imagery subsystems have been reported. More recently, research on individual differences has also provided evidence for two different types of imagers, namely Object and Spatial imagers (Kozhevnikov et al. 2005). Object imagers use imagery to create detailed and pictorial images of the shapes of objects, they perform very well on object imagery tasks and score poorly on spatial imagery tasks. Spatial imagers, that use imagery to represent and transform spatial relations, show a reversed pattern of performance. Differences were also found in perceptual processing: object imagers encode visual stimuli holistically while spatial imagers process figures analytically. A new self-report instrument, the object-spatial imagery questionnaire (OSIQ), has been proposed by Blajenkova et al. (Applied Cognitive Psychology, in press) to directly assess the two typologies.In the present studies we examined the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the OSIQ (Study 1) and we investigated its relationship with performance in a visuo-spatial memory task (Study 2). Study 1 Methods