The Visual Imagery Visually Anchored Scale (VIVAS) reveals dissociable perceptual dimensions and category-specific...

Visual imagery varies widely across individuals, from aphantasia (no imagery) to hyperphantasia (highly vivid imagery), yet most measurement tools rely on verbal self-report with limited external anchoring. We introduce the Visual Imagery Visually Anchored Scale (VIVAS), which asks people to reconstruct their mental images of objects from six categories (animals, buildings, faces, food, manmade objects, novel objects) along three dimensions (opacity, sharpness, color saturation) using visually presented anchors. VIVAS was administered to a probability-based panel randomly selected from the National Registry of Iceland (N = 205). VIVAS dimensions were highly related but not interchangeable: individual differences in color imagery reliably dissociated from those of opacity and sharpness, suggesting that imagery partly separates into structural clarity and chromaticity. Imagery also differed systematically across categories. Novel objects elicited the weakest imagery on all three dimensions, which highlights a central role for familiarity in shaping imagery strength. Food items showed selectively enhanced color imagery, consistent with the functional importance of color for evaluating edibility and with the overlap between food- and color-selective regions in visual cortex. VIVAS total scores did not differ by gender, age, education, or device type, supporting robustness for online administration. VIVAS correlated moderately with the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), well below the ceiling set by each instrument's reliability, and individual-level dissociations were striking: some participants scoring in the bottom 10% on one measure fell in the top quartile on the other. Verbal and visually anchored measures therefore appear to capture complementary, and sometimes divergent, facets of imagery.