Researchers from the University of Iceland and the University of Akureyri developed a new way to measure visual imagery, called VIVAS. Instead of verbal descriptions, participants rate their mental images using visual examples. The study was published in the scientific journal Cortex.
The 205 participants viewed an image for three seconds, then imagined it and rated its transparency, sharpness and colour, across six categories: animals, buildings, faces, food, everyday objects and novel objects.
Unfamiliar objects were the hardest to imagine, suggesting familiarity helps. Food was the exception: people imagined its colours especially vividly, possibly because colour matters when judging whether food is good to eat. The scale could help identify people with very weak or very strong visual imagery more precisely.
