Relationships among measures of visual imagery

Abstract

As a step toward the development of an objective measure of visualization ability, five tasks which yielded seven separate measures were administered to 74 Ss and intercorrelated. The tasks were: paired associate recall improvement (RI), recognition memory (RM), the Bett's Questionnaire on Mental Imagery (QMI) as revised by Sheehan (1967a, b), a task calling for the production of visual images (PVI) where rated vividness and latency of image attainment were measured, and a task requiring the imagining of emotional scenes (ES) where rated vividness and rated anxiety were measured. The results indicated that although paired associate learning scores per se were related to RM, neither of the memory measures of visualization (RI and RM) were related to any of the other visualization measures. A cluster of intercorrelations was obtained among self-ratings of image vividness on the QMI, PVI and ES tasks. This cluster also included a measure of latency of report of “best image” attainable derived from the PVI task. None of the measures correlated with anxiety ratings on the ES task. These findings were discussed in relation to previous studies and the potential value of the latency measure as an adjunct measure of visualization ability was noted.