Consequence of Individual Differences in Mental Imagery Ability

Abstract

Previous work has suggested that individuals differ in mental imagery ability and the way in which they recruit and routinely engage in cognitive tasks that require mental imagery. The present study investigates what the consequences of these individual differences are. Specifically, we examined whether training individuals to engage in visual motion mental imagery may have effects in other cognitive tasks such as the comprehension of linguistic descriptions of motion. To test this, we utilized the motion aftereffect illusion to gain an implicit measure of visual motion imagery ability before and after two different training conditions (imagery training where people either did or did not have to attend to motion-related information). We also measured the motion aftereffect from language following training. To measure language comprehension, participants were given a surprise memory test for the stories that they heard in the linguistic aftereffect task. Participants showed a priming effect from language comprehension rather than an aftereffect. There did not appear to be a relationship between the size of the motion aftereffect from language and language comprehension in this sample. This research helps us to better understand the relationship between mental imagery and language comprehension.