Name: Jennifer Spalten

Masters Thesis Proposal Meeting

Date: Friday, November 14, 2025

Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00pm

Location: Virtual, Meeting link click here

Thesis Chair/Advisor:

Mark Wheeler, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Thesis Committee Members:

Dingjing Shi, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Rick Thomas, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Title: Measuring the vivid mind: modifying the VVIQ and testing its relationship with recognition memory of concrete nouns

Abstract: The proposed study investigates how the vividness of visual mental imagery is measured and the relationship between vividness abilities and recognition memory of abstract versus concrete words. Specifically, we examined the effects of modulating the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) using a modified version with mental recreation of images in addition to eyes open/closed conditions. We hypothesized that (a) scores will vary on vividness for creating mental images versus visualizing previously shown images, (b) participants will report higher imagery vividness when eyes are closed than when eyes are open, and (c) individuals with stronger vividness abilities will outperform weaker imagers on concrete word recognition. Three online experiments were performed. The first two experiments measured vividness with the VVIQ and a novel Modified Recreation VVIQ (MR-VVIQ), followed by either an abstract to concrete rating or vividness rating noun encoding task and a subsequent old/new recognition test. The third experiment consisted of the VVIQ and MR-VVIQ with instructions to either keep eyes open or keep eyes closed during visualization. The results of this experiment will be used motivate subsequent study on how vividness ability is measured and whether incentives or task demands might encourage participants to rely more heavily on mental imagery during retrieval, thereby eliciting the hypothesized memory effect.