Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire

The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) was developed in 1973 by the British psychologist David Marks (Marks, 1973). The VVIQ consists of 16 items in four groups of 4 items in which the participant is invited to consider the image formed in thinking about specific scenes and situations. The vividness of the image is rated along a 5-point scale. The questionnaire has been widely used as a measure of individual differences in vividness of visual imagery. The large body of evidence confirms that the VVIQ is a valid and reliable psychometric measure of visual image vividness.

In 1995 Marks published a new version of the VVIQ, the VVIQ2 (Marks,1995). This questionnaire consists of twice the number of items and reverses the rating scale so that higher scores reflect higher vividness. Campos and Pérez-Fabello (2009) evaluated the reliability and construct validity of the VVIQ and the VVIQ2. Cronbach's reliabilities for both the VVIQ and the VVIQ-2 were found to be high. Estimates of internal consistency reliability and construct validity were found to be similar for the two versions.

Validation

The VVIQ has proved an essential tool in the scientific investigation of mental imagery as a phenomenological, behavioral and neurological construct. Marks' (1973) paper has been cited in more than 1200 studies of mental imagery in a variety of fields including cognitive psychology, clinical psychology and neuropsychology.

The procedure can be carried out with eyes closed and/or with eyes open. Total score on the VVIQ is a predictor of the person's performance in a variety of cognitive, motor, and creative tasks. For example, Marks (1973) reported that high vividness scores correlate with the accuracy of recall of coloured photographs.

Rodway, Gillies and Schepman (2006) used a novel long-term change detection task to determine whether participants with low and high vividness scores on the VVIQ2 showed any performance differences. Rodway et al. (2006) found that high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. This replicated an earlier study by Gur and Hilgard (1975).

Recent studies have found that individual differences in VVIQ scores can be used to predict changes in a person's brain while visualizing different activities. For example, Amedi, Malach and Pascual-Leone (2005) predicted that VVIQ scores might be correlated with the degree of deactivation of the auditory cortex in individual subjects in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These investigators found a significant positive correlation between the magnitude of A1 deactivation (negative blood-oxygen-level-dependent -BOLD- signal in auditory cortex) and the subjective vividness of visual imagery (Spearman r = 0.73, p < 0.05).

References
    • Amedi, A., Malach, R. & Pascual-Leone, A. (2005). . "Negative BOLD Differentiates Visual Imagery and Perception". Neuron, 48, 859–872.
    • Campos, A. & Pérez-Fabello, M.J. (2009). "Psychometric quality of a revised version Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire". Perceptual & Motor Skills, 108, 798-802.
    • Cui, X., Jeter, C.B., Yang, D., Montague, P.R., & Eagleman, D.M. (2007). "Vividness of mental imagery: Individual variability can be measured objectively". Vision Research, 47, 474-478.
    • Gur, R.C. & Hilgard, E.R. (1975). "Visual imagery and discrimination of differences between altered pictures simultaneously and successively presented". British Journal of Psychology, 66, 341-345.
    • Lee, S-H., Kravitz, D.J., & Baker, C. I. (2012). “Disentangling visual imagery and perception of real-world objects”. NeuroImage, 59, 4064–4073.
    • Logie, R.H., Pernet, C.R., Buonocore, A., & Della Sala, S. (2011). "Low and high imagers activate networks differentially in mental rotation". Neuropsychologia, 49, 3071-3077.
    • Marks, D.F. (1973). "Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures". British Journal of Psychology, 64, 17-24.
    • Marks, D.F. (1995). "New directions for mental imagery research". Journal of Mental Imagery, 19, 153-167.
    • Rodway, P., Gillies, K. & Schepman, A. (2006). "Vivid imagers are better at detecting salient changes". Journal of Individual Differences, 27, 218-228.
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