VOL. XXXVII PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW PUBLICATIONS WHOLE NO. 172 1927 Psychological Monographs EDITED BY SHEPHERD IVORY FRANZ, UNIV. OF CALIF. AT LOS ANGELES MADISON BENTLEY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS (J. of Exp. Psych.) Individual Differences in Imagery BY CHARLES H. GRIFFITTS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW COMPANY AGENTS: PRINCETON, N. J. AND ALBANY, N. Y. G. E. STECHERT & CO., LONDON (2 Star Yard, Carey St., W. C.) V. Test 4. Dominance of concrete imagery. VII. Test 6. U-L test. PAGE 1 8 15 20 27 37 44 53 58 66 75 91 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Until about fifty years ago it was generally believed that for each individual there were as many kinds of what we now call "images" or "centrally aroused sensations as kinds of sensations; and occasionally, as in St. Augustine's Confessions we find introspections to support that belief. It is somewhat remarkable that the "Ideologists" or "Associationists" did not discover the V individual differences in imagery, although they had not been trained to make the distinction now made by many psychologists between imagery or sensation and “meaning.” 1. A study of the origin and development of the notion of distinct types of individuals with respect to imagery reveals three more or less independent sources, each leading to separate lines of investigation dealing with different aspects of the problem. The first of these may be traced back at least as far as Fechner's account of the visual imagery of several different individuals, reported about 1860. However, most of the work in this line seems to have been inspired by Galton's report of the difference in clearness of the visual imagery of a fairly large number of individuals. Galton's study, and subsequent studies in this line, have been made exclusively of the images of objects (“concrete imagery, as distinct from " verbal "). Most of Galton's followers assumed that the individual with indistinct visual imagery must of necessity have clear and distinct imagery of some other kind, although Galton does not appear to have made this blunder. 2. A second line of investigation, never adequately correlated with the first, also dealt with concrete imagery, but with what Segal calls the "quantitative " aspect, as distinct from the "qualitative " aspect studied by Galton. Instead of dealing with the clearness of voluntarily aroused imagery these studies have been of the frequency of the different kinds of imagery that is non-voluntarily aroused, although it is non-voluntary only in the sense that no one kind of imagery is specified. Sometimes the subject is prac |