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

Sebastian Paul Suggate¹

¹Department of Education, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany. sebastian.suggate@ur.de.

Behavior Research Methods

|September 13, 2024

Summary

A new mental comparison task (MCT) offers a reliable way to measure individual differences in mental imagery across visual, auditory, and tactile senses. This objective measure shows validity and is independent of processing speed.

Keywords:

Imagination Mental imagery Self-report imagery Tactile Visual

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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.