Imagery Vividness (Multiple Senses — QMI) (IMVIVQMI)

1. Abstract

The Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (QMI), developed in its shortened 35-item format by Peter W. Sheehan (1967) based on the seminal 150-item psychometric instrument by George Herbert Betts (1909), represents one of the foundational and most enduring instruments for assessing multi-sensory mental imagery vividness in psychological science. Unlike single-modality instruments such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), the QMI captures subjective clarity and perceptual realism across seven distinct sensory domains: visual, auditory, cutaneous (tactile), kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory, and organic (visceral/interoceptive) modalities. Each modality is probed via five items rated along an authentic 7-point Likert-type vividness continuum ranging from 1 (“Perfectly clear and as vivid as the normal vision/perception”) to 7 (“No image present at all, you only ‘know’ that you are thinking of the object”). Consequently, lower total scores (range: 35–245) signify superior phenomenological clarity and strength of voluntarily evoked mental representations. Psychometrically, the shortened QMI demonstrates high internal consistency across diverse populations (overall Cronbach’s alpha typically spanning .88 to .95; subscale alphas ranging from .67 to .87) and robust test-retest reliability ($r = .74$ to $.88$ across short-to-medium intervals). Factor-analytic investigations reveal a dominant general imagery factor alongside seven correlated first-order sensory dimensions. The instrument has facilitated critical empirical advancements in cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychopathology (e.g., trauma intrusive imagery, depression, and somatic disorders), hypnotic susceptibility research, athletic performance enhancement, and the contemporary investigation of perceptual extremes such as aphantasia and hyperphantasia.

2. Keywords

Mental imagery, vividness, Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery, QMI, multi-sensory imagery, Peter Sheehan, George Herbert Betts, visual imagery, auditory imagery, kinesthetic imagery, interoception, aphantasia, psychometrics

3. Authors

The shortened version of the Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery was developed by Peter W. Sheehan, Ph.D. (1937–2019), an eminent Australian psychologist and cognitive psychophysiologist. Sheehan served as Professor of Psychology and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Queensland, and subsequently as Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University. Renowned internationally for his pioneering experimental contributions to the nature of hypnosis, memory distortion, social psychological dynamics, and mental simulation, Sheehan standardized and shortened Betts’ scale while working in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sydney and collaborating with researchers at the Institute for Experimental Psychiatry in Pennsylvania.

The instrument directly traces its intellectual and operational lineage to George Herbert Betts, Ph.D. (1868–1934), an influential American educational psychologist and student of Edward L. Thorndike at Teachers College, Columbia University. Betts published his monumental doctoral dissertation, The Distribution and Functions of Mental Imagery, in 1909, constructing a comprehensive 150-item inventory designed to map individual differences in imagery across every recognized human sensory channel. Sheehan’s psychometric condensation in 1967 reduced Betts’ cumbersome inventory by over 75% while preserving its multi-factorial breadth and content validity.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the shortened Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (QMI) is to provide an efficient, psychometrically sound, standardized self-report index of an individual’s capacity to intentionally generate clear, vivid, and phenomenologically authentic sensory experiences in the absence of actual external sensory stimulation. Whereas early twentieth-century introspectionist psychology debated whether mental imagery was a uniform cognitive faculty or an idiosyncratic epiphenomenon, the QMI operationalized imagery as a multi-dimensional, quantifiable trait that varies reliably across individuals and across specific sensory modalities within the same individual.

In modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the QMI serves as a critical measure for exploring how mental simulation shares neurocomputational architecture with direct perception. It enables researchers to quantify how variations in multi-sensory imagery vividness influence episodic memory recall, prospective planning, spatial navigation, linguistic comprehension, and mental rotation. The inclusion of non-visual modalities makes the QMI exceptionally valuable: while visual imagery dominates the experimental literature, human cognition relies profoundly on auditory imagery (e.g., inner speech, musical rehearsal), kinesthetic feedback (e.g., motor simulation and athletic execution), and interoceptive or organic awareness (e.g., autonomic regulation, pain anticipation, and emotional empathy).

Within clinical psychology and psychiatry, the QMI is applied to assess cognitive patterns in psychological disorders. For instance, in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), involuntary intrusive memories often present as hyper-vivid, multi-sensory reenactments featuring olfactory, tactile, and visceral distress. Conversely, major depressive disorder is often characterized by blunted imagery vividness for future positive events, accompanied by impaired interoceptive processing. In eating disorders, gustatory and olfactory imagery biases heavily correlate with compulsive craving and body-image distortion. Additionally, the QMI has a historical role in hypnotherapy and hypnotic suggestibility research, where baseline imagery vividness across sensory modalities predicts an individual’s response to sensory suggestions, analgesia, and age-regression protocols.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the QMI is imagery vividness across multiple sensory modalities. In psychophysics and phenomenology, “vividness” refers to the richness, clarity, detail, and sensory realism of a self-generated mental representation relative to the qualia produced during actual perceptual contact with an environmental stimulus. Vividness incorporates the dimension of subjective sensory brightness and resolution, distinct from the orthogonal construct of imagery controllability (the capacity to manipulate or transform an image at will). The QMI measures voluntary, goal-directed vividness across seven distinct operational dimensions:

• Visual Imagery: The capacity to intentionally evoke optical features such as color, form, luminance, spatial proportion, contour, and depth. Items assess complex perceptual scenes, such as the exact facial contours and body carriage of an acquaintance or the chromatic degradation of a sunset.
• Auditory Imagery: The generation of mental acoustic phenomena, including pitch, timbre, amplitude, rhythm, and cadence. Probed scenarios range from mechanical transients (e.g., the blast of an automobile horn, locomotive whistle) to organic and natural sounds (e.g., the mewing of a cat, wind whistling through trees).
• Cutaneous (Tactile) Imagery: The subjective recreation of somatosensory tactile impressions, encompassing surface texture, friction, thermal perception, and focal mechanical deformation of the skin (e.g., feeling dry sand, textured linen, soft animal fur, or the sharp mechanical pain of a pinprick).
• Kinesthetic Imagery: The representation of movement, muscular effort, tension, balance, and proprioceptive changes within joints and ligaments during active physical exertion. It reflects dynamic motor imagery, such as kicking a football, leaping over a ditch, or ascending a staircase.
• Gustatory Imagery: The simulation of chemoperceptual sensations mediated by lingual taste buds (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami). Items involve common tastants requiring distinct chemical identification, including table salt, granulated sugar, fresh citrus fruit, and hot soup.
• Olfactory Imagery: The voluntary retrieval of odorant perceptual memory mediated by the olfactory system. It covers volatile organic compounds ranging from agreeable aromas (freshly mown grass, roast beef) to chemical pungency (fresh paint) and unpleasant ambient odors (an ill-ventilated room, boiling cabbage).
• Organic (Interoceptive) Imagery: The subjective awareness of visceral, autonomic, and systemic bodily sensations originating within internal organs, mucous membranes, or physiological homeostatic systems. Items probe distressing or drive-related states, such as acute hunger pangs, localized visceral discomfort (stomach ache), respiratory congestion from a cold, and localized somatic trauma.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the QMI is rooted in classic introspectionism, contemporary cognitive science, and grounded or embodied cognition. The conceptual basis was initiated by Sir Francis Galton (1880) in his famous “breakfast table” investigations. Galton discovered vast, continuous individual differences in the subjective vividness of mental imagery, noting that while some individuals reported internal representations comparable to waking physical perception, others experienced no subjective sensory qualities whatsoever.

In 1909, George Herbert Betts synthesized Galton’s observations within the structuralist paradigm, arguing that mental imagery is not an isolated cognitive curiosity, but a primary mode of thought that parallels sensory anatomy. Betts asserted that every sensory receptor surface that informs the central nervous system must have a corresponding introspective imagery domain. When Peter Sheehan revisited Betts’ instrument in 1967, cognitive psychology was undergoing the Cognitive Revolution, shifting away from radical behaviorism’s rejection of private mental events toward an empirical analysis of internal representations.

Sheehan’s work aligned with Allan Paivio’s Dual-Coding Theory (1971), which posits that human cognition operates via two distinct yet interacting representational systems: a nonverbal, imaginal system specialized for representing sensory characteristics, and a verbal system specialized for linguistic units. The QMI operationalizes the nonverbal system by requiring participants to suppress verbal propositional labeling and directly access sensory memory stores.

Modern cognitive neuroscience provides a biological framework for the QMI through Stephen Kosslyn’s Depictive Theory of Mental Imagery and modern Embodied Cognition frameworks (e.g., Lawrence Barsalou’s Perceptual Symbol Systems). Functional neuroimaging studies confirm that voluntary mental imagery reactivates the primary and secondary sensory cortices that process real-world stimuli. When an individual imagines a visual scene, primary visual cortex (V1) and ventral temporal pathways activate; auditory imagery recruits Heschl’s gyrus and auditory association areas; motor imagery engages the supplementary motor area (SMA) and premotor cortex; and organic imagery involves the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. The QMI thus reflects top-down neural simulations, wherein frontoparietal control networks re-instantiate sensory patterns within modality-specific sensory cortices.

7. Validity

The shortened QMI has undergone extensive empirical validation, demonstrating strong construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across several decades of cognitive and clinical research:

• Construct and Convergent Validity: Sheehan (1967) initially confirmed construct validity by demonstrating that the shortened 35-item version correlated exceptionally highly with Betts’ original 150-item instrument ($r = .92$ to $.98$ across subscales and total score), establishing that the abbreviated format maintained the psychometric coverage of the original scale. Convergent validity is evidenced by significant correlations with David Marks’ (1973) Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), with coefficients typically exceeding $r = .70$ on the visual subscale. Additionally, performance on the kinesthetic and tactile subscales correlates moderately with the Movement Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-3) and objective motor simulation indices.
• Criterion-Related and Objective Physiological Validity: Research indicates that participants who score high in imagery vividness (low scores on the QMI) show greater physiological reactivity during guided imagery than those with poorer vividness. Studies assessing autonomic arousal (e.g., skin conductance response, heart rate variability) in response to fearful or appetizing mental imagery report significant correlations with QMI organic, gustatory, and olfactory scores. Neuroimaging investigations (e.g., fMRI and magnetoencephalography) demonstrate that participants reporting high vividness on the QMI show greater blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes in primary and secondary sensory cortices during mental simulation tasks.
• Discriminant Validity: The QMI successfully discriminates between the subjective vividness of mental imagery and objective spatial ability (such as mental rotation performance). In line with modern cognitive models that differentiate between “object imagery” (vividness of pictorial, surface visual properties) and “spatial imagery” (processing spatial relations, transformations, and coordinate systems), the QMI visual subscale loads independently from spatial reasoning assessments (e.g., the Vandenberg and Kuse Mental Rotations Test). Furthermore, scores on the QMI show negligible or weak associations with general intelligence, measures of socially desirable responding (e.g., Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), and verbal fluency, confirming that the instrument taps sensory phenomenological experiences rather than verbal intelligence or self-presentation biases.

8. Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the shortened QMI has been documented across normative, academic, and clinical samples:

• Internal Consistency: Sheehan (1967) reported an overall split-half reliability coefficient of $.99$ for the 35-item scale when corrected by the Spearman-Brown formula. Subsequent evaluations using modern test theory have consistently verified high internal consistency, with overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between $.88$ and $.95$. Individual modality subscales (comprising 5 items each) exhibit respectable alpha levels, generally spanning $.75$ to $.88$ for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic dimensions, and $.67$ to $.82$ for gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and organic dimensions. The slightly lower alpha values for chemical and visceral domains reflect the brief, 5-item composition alongside broad phenomenological coverage within those sensory systems.
• Test-Retest Stability: The temporal stability of the QMI has been corroborated across intervals ranging from two weeks to six months. Sheehan (1967) reported short-term test-retest coefficients exceeding $.80$. Longitudinal studies (e.g., Juhasz, 1972; Westcott & Rosenstock, 1976; McKelvie, 1994) have yielded stability coefficients between $r = .74$ and $r = .88$ over multi-week intervals, indicating that individual differences in voluntary multi-sensory vividness remain stable across time in healthy adult populations.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the 35-item QMI has been evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse cultural and language cohorts:

• Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA): In his pioneering work, Sheehan (1967) observed that a single, large unrotated first principal component accounted for a substantial proportion of the total variance, leading him to postulate a primary general factor of mental imagery vividness (“imagery g”). However, subsequent orthogonal and oblique rotations (e.g., White, Ashton, & Brown, 1977; Richardson, 1977) demonstrated that the 35 items consistently load onto seven distinct, intercorrelated factors corresponding directly to the a priori sensory modalities: Visual, Auditory, Cutaneous, Kinesthetic, Gustatory, Olfactory, and Organic. Factor loadings for designated items onto their respective sensory latent factors are strong, typically ranging from $.52$ to $.84$, with negligible cross-loadings.
• Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA): Contemporary structural equation modeling supports a hierarchical (second-order) model or a bifactor model over a strict single-factor unidimensional model. The hierarchical model specifies seven first-order factors that load onto a single higher-order “General Imagery Vividness” factor. Fit indices for this second-order structure are generally acceptable to good (e.g., $\chi^2/df < 2.5$, Comparative Fit Index $[CFI] ge .91$, Tucker-Lewis Index $[TLI] ge .90$, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation $[RMSEA] le .055$, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual $[SRMR] le .058$). The bifactor model demonstrates that while a global vividness disposition accounts for common item variance, sensory-specific factors explain meaningful unique variance, confirming the utility of both the total score and the individual subscale scores in research and diagnostic assessments.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational characteristics and administration specifications of the shortened Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery are detailed below:

• Scale Name: Imagery Vividness (Multiple Senses — QMI) / Shortened Form of Betts’ Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery (IMVIVQMI)
• Authors: Peter W. Sheehan (1967), based on George Herbert Betts (1909)
• Instrument Type: Standardized self-report rating scale
• Number of Items: 35 items
• Subscales / Dimensions: 7 sensory modalities (5 items per modality):
  • Visual (Items 1–5)
  • Auditory (Items 6–10)
  • Cutaneous / Tactile (Items 11–15)
  • Kinesthetic (Items 16–20)
  • Gustatory (Items 21–25)
  • Olfactory (Items 26–30)
  • Organic (Items 31–35)
• Administration Format: Individual or group administration; paper-and-pencil or computerized/online formats; self-administered.
• Estimated Time to Complete: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.
• Response Scale (Authentic 7-point Likert continuum):
  • 1 = Perfectly clear and as vivid as the normal vision/perception
  • 2 = Very clear and comparable in vividness to the actual experience
  • 3 = Moderately clear and vivid
  • 4 = Not clear or vivid, but recognizable
  • 5 = Vague and dim
  • 6 = So weak and dim as to be hardly perceptible
  • 7 = No image present at all, you only ‘know’ that you are thinking of the object
• Scoring and Directionality Rules:
  • Item responses are summed to compute modality subscale scores (5 to 35 per subscale) and a grand total score (35 to 245).
  • Inverse Scoring Direction: The scale is scored such that lower numerical values indicate greater vividness of mental imagery. A score of 35 reflects maximum possible multi-sensory vividness across all domains, whereas a score of 245 denotes complete aphantasic absence of sensory imagery across all seven systems.
  • Researchers who prefer standard positive scaling often reverse the coding mathematically (e.g., by subtracting each response from 8, converting 1 to 7 and 7 to 1); however, under the original scoring metric published by Sheehan (1967), lower raw totals correspond directly to higher phenomenological vividness.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The shortened Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery was published in its standardized format in 1967 by Dr. Peter W. Sheehan in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. The conceptual parent instrument by Dr. George Herbert Betts was originally published in 1909 by Teachers College, Columbia University, and is firmly established in the public domain. Sheehan’s 1967 shortened 35-item scale is widely accessible in the peer-reviewed psychological literature for scholarly, academic, and non-commercial scientific research without fee. Researchers and clinicians should cite the foundational validation publication by Sheehan (1967) in all empirical reports. Any commercial reproduction, inclusion in commercial assessment software packages, or proprietary diagnostic tool development should be verified in accordance with journal publisher permissions and standard copyright conventions.

12. References

• Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4), 577–660. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x99002149
• Betts, G. H. (1909). The distribution and functions of mental imagery (Contributions to Education, No. 26). Teachers College, Columbia University.
• Galton, F. (1880). Statistics of mental imagery. Mind, 5(19), 301–318. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-5.19.301
• Juhasz, J. B. (1972). On the reliability of two measures of imagery. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 35(3), 874. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1972.35.3.874
• Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and brain: The resolution of the imagery debate. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3649.001.0001
• Marks, D. F. (1973). Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 64(1), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1973.tb01322.x
• McKelvie, S. J. (1994). The Questionnaire Upon Mental Imagery: Normative data and stability for Sheehan’s version. Journal of Mental Imagery, 18(1–2), 187–208.
• Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and verbal processes. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• Richardson, A. (1977). Verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style: A review of the concept and its measurement. Journal of Mental Imagery, 1(1), 109–126.
• Sheehan, P. W. (1967). A shortened form of Betts’ questionnaire upon mental imagery. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 23(3), 386–389. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049537708255278
• Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019

13. Items of the Scale