Mental Imagery and Working Memory

Abstract

Mental imagery is a perceptual experience without sensory input, often described as seeing with the mind's eye, hearing with the mind's ear and so on (Pearson, Naselaris, Holmes, & Kosslyn, 2015). Studies have shown that mental imagery can have a powerful impact on emotions and behavior. For example, guiding participants in the use of mental simulations to engage in enjoyable and routine future activities (e.g. going for a walk, reading a book) via mental imagery promotes motivation to engage in these activities and leads to an increased engagement in planned activities (Renner, Ji, Pictet, Holmes, & Blackwell, 2017; Renner, Murphy, Ji, Manly, & Holmes, 2019). In the context of mental disorders, individuals with depression often have difficulty engaging in vivid future directed mental imagery (Holmes, Blackwell, Burnett Heyes, Renner, & Raes, 2016) while higher vividness of positive future imagery is related to resilience factors such as optimism (Ji, Holmes, & Blackwell, 2017). Thus, it is clinically relevant to study factors associated individual differences in mental imagery ability. Previous studies have related the ability to engage in vivid mental imagery to individual differences in working memory capacity. Initial evidence suggests that this relation might be specific to visual working memory: low visual working memory, but not verbal working memory, has been related to mental imagery ability (Keogh & Pearson, 2011, 2014). However, previous studies were limited to one basic mental imagery task involving imagery of Gabor patterns while it remains unknown how working memory capacity is related to prospective mental imagery. Therefore, the aim of this pilot study is to test the association between prospective mental imagery and visual and verbal working memory in a cross-sectional study with non-clinical participants from the general population.