Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

The Relationship Between Mental Imagery Ability and Memory Representations

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Rayna Tang¹ (rayna@wustl.edu), Xinran Zhao¹, Hannah Sabio¹, Zachariah Reagh¹; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

Mental imagery ability varies considerably among individuals. While previous research has primarily examined visual perception and memory in individuals with polarized mental imagery abilities, the relationship between mental imagery and memory representations remains poorly understood. Here, we designed a novel paradigm using The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a movie stimulus ideal for studying mental imagery due to its comprehensibility through audio alone. Participants with varying mental imagery abilities, as assessed by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, engaged in two encoding conditions: watching half of the movie with both visuals and audio (Condition 1) and the other half with audio only (Condition 2). Following each encoding block, participants completed a verbal recall task. We also administered a perceptually-driven screenshot recognition task, and a separate sentence recognition task. In the recognition task, novel images were taken from a separate movie, Poison (matched for director, cast, and style). Data collection is in progress. Planned analyses include comparing semantic similarities between movie transcripts and verbal recall, and calculating the hit and false alarm rates for both recognition tasks. We predict that participants with higher mental imagery scores will show lower semantic similarity in recall and reduced accuracy in recognizing transcript wording, with heavier reliance on visual representations during recall. Relatedly, given a reliance on visual representations for memory-guided decisions, we predict increased target hits and false alarms for visually-similar screenshots in individuals with strong mental imagery. This study will provide novel insights into the relationship between mental imagery and episodic memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic