The Internal Representations Questionnaire: Measuring modes of thinking
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The Internal Representations Questionnaire: Measuring modes of thinking Hettie Roebuck 1 & Gary Lupyan 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Does the format in which we experience our moment-to-moment thoughts vary from person to person? Many people claim that their thinking takes place in an inner voice and that using language outside of interpersonal communication is a regular experience for them. Other people disagree. We present a novel measure, the Internal Representation Questionnaire (IRQ) designed to assess people’s subjective mode of internal representations, and to quantify individual differences in “modes of thinking” along multiple factors in a single questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis identified four factors: Internal Verbalization, Visual Imagery, Orthographic Imagery, and Representational Manipulation. All four factors were positively correlated with one another, but accounted for unique predictions. We describe the properties of the IRQ and report a test of its ability to predict patterns of interference in a speeded word-picture verification task. Taken together, the results suggest that self-reported differences in how people internally represent their thoughts relates to differences in processing familiar images and written words. Keywords Internal representations . Inner voice . Verbal representation . Cognitive style . Learning preference . Thought . Language
Just as perception is often accompanied by phenomenology— it feels like something to imagine seeing a bicycle or to imagine hearing Für Elise—our internal thoughts often have a phenomenological character. What does it feel like to think through a problem? To recall last week’s party? To imagine a friend’s face? Most of us can say something about what these internal processes feel like to us. It is tempting to assume that this phenomenology is universal. However, evidence to date suggests that this is not the case. In 1880, Galton published the results of a survey of individual differences in visual imagery, asking 100 British men (including 19 Fellows of the Royal Society) to comment on their ability to visually imagine various kinds of information. Responses ranged from a very developed ability: “Thinking of the breakfast table this morning, all the objects in my mental picture are as bright as the actual Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01354-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Hettie Roebuck [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
scene” to none: “My powers are zero. To my consciousness there is almost no association of memory with objective visual impressions. I recollect the breakfast table, but do not see it.” (Galton, 1880, pp 304–306)1 Contemporary work on individual differences in visual imagery has continued to use survey instruments similar to those used by Galton, e.g., the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire; VVIQ (Marks, 1973) and the Obj
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