Author: Emma Young / Source: Big Think
Imagination is sometimes claimed to be a uniquely human ability, and it has long intrigued psychologists. “Nevertheless, our understanding of the benefits and risks that individual differences in imagination hold for psychological outcomes is currently limited,” note two researchers who have created a new psychometric test – the Imaginative Behaviour Engagement Scale (IBES) – for measuring how much imagination a person has, and then used it to investigate whether, as some earlier work hinted, having a stronger imagination might aid learning and creativity.
According to Sophie von Stumm at the University of York and Hannah Scott at UCL, writing in the British Journal of Psychology, imagination is the tendency to create “mental representations of concepts, ideas and sensations in the mind that are not contemporaneously perceived by the senses [and ranges] from the re-creation of images or sensory perceptions in the mind that were previously seen and experienced in reality ….to crafting images anew independent of prior actual sensory input.”
It’s not exactly a snappy definition. But that’s partly a consequence of what the pair terms the “definition and measurement issues” that have plagued academic inquiry into imagination, including a lack of agreement among psychologists on a precise definition that distinguishes it from related constructs, such as fantasy or mental imagery.
To research what the new test should include, von Stumm and Scott conducted a literature search and interviews with “expert psychometricians”. This led them to identify seven “domains of imagination” and their test includes two items measuring each of these, including how much a person: had imaginary friends as a child; is inclined to daydreaming; dreams; thinking styles (for example: “Do you ever play around with ideas just for fun?”); how often they feel a sense of feeling transported while reading a book or watching a movie; their “imaginative responsiveness” (for example: “If you wished, could you imagine that you had an additional arm so much that you would feel the limb and its movements?”) and their proclivity for fantasies.
In the first study, the pair explored links between imagination (based on the IBES), personality and learning performance in 180 participants who were mostly undergraduate students. After taking an initial logical thinking test and then studying a scholarly text, the participants were immediately tested, and then later re-tested a week later, to see what they could remember of the text. They also completed the IBES and personality surveys at various time-points. Their IBES scores correlated…
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