Correlations and Sex Differences in Seven Sensory Modalities of Imagery

Mental images are representations of people, objects, and situations that are not actually present at the time of visualizing an image (Campos, 1998; Paivio, 1979; Piaget, 1962; Richardson, 1980). Mental imagery may be classified according to the sensory organs involved, i.e., visual, auditory, cutaneous, kinaesthetic, gustatory, olfactory and organic imagery (Campos, 1998; Denis, 1984). Imagery questionnaires and performance tests are extensively used to measure image vividness. Tulving, McNulty, and Ozier (1965), and Paivio (1965) defined vividness of imagery as the ease with which you can picture something in your mind when presented the word. The most widely used questionnaire is the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Mark, 1973; McKelvie, 1995), and the questionnaire most extensively used to measure image vividness in all of the sensory modalities is the abridged version (Sheehan, 1967) of the Questionnaire Upon Mental Imagery (Betts, 1909). Most mental imagery studies have focused on visual imagery, but a few have assessed the other senses. The same has occurred with imagery questionnaires, i.e., most measured visual imagery, but a few examined the mental imagery of the other senses (Campos & Perez-Fabello, 2005, 2011; Gissurarson, 1992; Richardson, 1994; Willander & Baraldi, 2010). The only questionnaire measuring the seven different types of imagery corresponding to the seven sensory modalities is the Betts' Questionnaire Upon Mental Imagery (Betts' QMI; Sheehan, 1967). Though the Betts' QMI (Sheehan, 1967) has been extensively used, the seven scales that comprise it have rarely been evaluated, as they are normally used in their totality. The only study to have examined the correlations between the scales on the questionnaire in relation to sex found significant correlations among all of the scales (Ernest, 1983). The correlations between the scales on the Betts' QMI ranged from .44 (p The differences between women and men regarding the vividness of mental imagery remains a controversial issue in cognitive psychology and, in spite of the numerous studies, there is no satisfactory consensus (see Richardson, 1994, for a review). For example, the numerous studies that have used the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks, 1973) have reported contradictory results. Richardson (1995) reviewed the literature and reported that women obtained slightly higher scores than men on the VVIQ, but McKelvie's (1995) review of the literature found no significant sex difference on this questionnaire. Two of the obstacles hindering any precise determination of differences in mental imagery between women and men are the numerous types of mental imagery, and the many ways of measuring them (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2009; Campos, 2009, 2012, 2014; Horowitz, 1983). On the whole, most measures of imagery are based either on imagery questionnaires or performance tests (see Campos, 2014, for a review). Surprisingly, correlations between imagery questionnaires and performance tests were poor or not significant (Burton & Fogarty, 2003; Campos, 2009, 2012, 2014; Ernest, 1977). Notwithstanding, the correlations between the performance tests themselves were high, and the correlations for the imagery questionnaires were also high both in women and in men, and in the group total for both genders (Burton & Fogarty, 2003; Campos, 2014; Ernest, 1983). Few studies have examined sex in relation to scoring on each of the scales of the Betts' QMI (Ernest, 1983; Sacco & Reda, 1998; Sheehan, 1967). …