Comparing Mental Imagery across the Sensory Modalities

Previous studies using introspective reports have suggested that although mental images can contain elements referring to all sensory modalities, visual images tend to be experienced as most vivid, whereas olfactory and gustatory images tend to be least vivid. However, these studies have typically used arbitrarily selected events and objects as the to-be-imagined stimuli, which may have biased cross-modal comparison. Therefore, in the present study participants were instructed to imagine an event or product of their choice that elicited a conspicuous or characteristic appearance, sound, feel, smell, or taste. The results showed that the types of events imagined differed considerably across modalities. Similar to previous studies in this area, we found that the reported image quality was consistently highest for vision and audition, and lowest for smell.