Research Project
Full description There have been multiple attempts to measure individual differences in the salience of people's imagined sensory experiences - without relying on self-reports. However, prominent metrics have relied on specialised equipment (e.g., eye tracking infrastructure to measure pupil dilations). Our aim was to find a behavioural measure that does not require specialised equipment, and that can be used online at scale. We investigated whether semantic priming from imagery could be used to predict individual differences in the subjective salience of imagined audio and visual sensations. Participants were directed to imagine or to suppress a visual or an audio scenario, prior to a timed word completion task. We recorded error rates, reaction times, and people's propensity to report having an imagined experience of the cued scenario on Suppression trials (involuntary intrusions). We found main effects of instructions (Imagination vs Suppression), modality (visual vs auditory), and of priming (positive vs negative). The probability of intrusions were weakly positively associated with the subjective salience of people's imagined sensory experiences. However, the extent of semantic priming from pre-imagining sensory experiences was unrelated to the reported salience of people's imagined experiences. Of the two measures, involuntary intrusions were a better indicator of the salience of a person's imagined sensory experiences. However, even these were weak predictors, and unlikely to serve as a useful tool to accurately predict whether a given individual is likely to have strong or weak imagined experiences.