ABSTRACT
Galton (1880) arguably produced the first psychometric instrument when he developed his procedure for measuring the vividness of mental imagery. He constructed a questionnaire that he had completed by both students and by professional men. The questionnaire contained specifications for various situations for which they were to try to elicit images. One request was to call up from memory the scene of their breakfast table that morning. His subjects were to say whether the image they had was dim or clear, the objects ill or well defined, in colour or monochrome, and to rate the extent of the contents
of the field of view etc. (Watson, 1963). Galton found that some individuals reported that they could evoke no visual images while others reported near veridical imagery. In particular, he found that many eminent scientists had poor vividness of imagery that he explained as perhaps the price of profound abstract reasoning. This procedure has long been associated with discriminating between different modes of thinking associated with exceptional levels of performance. Galton’s procedure was formalised as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) by Marks (1973). He used five items from the Betts (1909) formulation and 11 additional items. The VVIQ has good psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity (Gur and Hilgard, 1975; Isaac and Marks, 1994). It is completed twice, once with eyes open and then with closed eyes. The two scores can be summed.
