The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire was developed in 1973 by the British psychologist David Marks. The VVIQ consists of 16 items in four groups of 4 items in which the participant is invited to consider the image formed in thinking about specific scenes and situations. The vividness of the image is rated along a 5-point scale. The questionnaire has been widely used as a measure of individual differences in vividness of visual imagery. The large body of evidence confirms that the VVIQ is a valid and reliable psychometric measure of visual image vividness. In 1995 Marks published a new version of the VVIQ, the VVIQ2. This questionnaire consists of twice the number of items and reverses the rating scale so that higher scores reflect higher vividness. Campos and Pérez-Fabello evaluated the reliability and construct validity of the VVIQ and the VVIQ2. Cronbach's reliabilities for both the VVIQ and the VVIQ-2 were found to be high. Estimates of internal consistency reliability and construct validity were found to be similar for the two versions. The VVIQ and VVIQ2 are both available on the Internet and on YouTube.
Validation
The VVIQ has proved an essential tool in the scientific investigation of mental imagery as a phenomenological, behavioral and neurological construct. Marks' paper has been cited in more than 1200 studies of mental imagery in a variety of fields including cognitive psychology, clinical psychology and neuropsychology. The procedure can be carried out with eyes closed and/or with eyes open. Total score on the VVIQ is a predictor of the person's performance in a variety of cognitive, motor, and creative tasks. For example, Marks reported that high vividness scores correlate with the accuracy of recall of coloured photographs. Rodway, Gillies and Schepman used a novel long-term change detection task to determine whether participants with low and high vividness scores on the VVIQ2 showed any performance differences. Rodway et al. found that high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. This replicated an earlier study by Gur and Hilgard. Recent studies have found that individual differences in VVIQ scores can be used to predict changes in a person's brain while visualizing different activities. For example, Amedi, Malach and Pascual-Leone predicted that VVIQ scores might be correlated with the degree of deactivation of the auditory cortex in individual subjects in functional magnetic resonance imaging. These investigators found a significant positive correlation between the magnitude of A1 deactivation and the subjective vividness of visual imagery.
