Beyond self-report: Measuring visual, auditory, and tactile mental imagery using a mental comparison task

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychometrics

Background:

• Assessing individual differences in mental imagery objectively across sensory modalities is challenging.
• Existing measures often rely on subjective self-reports or are limited to a single sensory modality.
• Mental imagery is hypothesized to involve multimodal sensorimotor simulations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a novel Mental Comparison Task (MCT) for measuring individual differences in mental imagery.
• To investigate the reliability, validity, and modality-specific performance of the MCT.
• To examine the relationship between the MCT and self-report measures of mental imagery, and its independence from processing speed.

Main Methods:

• Developed and administered a Mental Comparison Task (MCT) across three studies with a total of 948 adult participants.
• Analyzed the internal consistency and validity of the MCT.
• Collected data on response latencies and accuracies for visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli.
• Assessed correlations with established self-report imagery scales and controlled for processing speed.

Main Results:

• The MCT demonstrated good internal consistency, reliability, and validity.
• Performance (speed and accuracy) was highest in the visual modality, followed by auditory, then tactile.
• The MCT showed minimal correlation with self-report imagery scales, suggesting they capture different constructs.
• MCT performance remained robust even after accounting for individual differences in processing speed.

Conclusions:

• The MCT provides a reliable and valid objective measure of individual differences in multimodal mental imagery.
• The findings support the notion that objective tasks and self-report questionnaires tap into distinct facets of mental imagery.
• The MCT is a promising tool for future research on the nature and measurement of mental imagery.