Cross Modality Correlations in the Imagery of Adults and 5-year-old Children

This research examined visual and auditory imagery in adults and 5-year-old children. We focused on 3 broad issues: 1) parallels between visual and auditory imagery; 2) static and dynamic imagery processes within the visual and auditory modalities; and 3) individual differences in these imagery processes. In Experiments 1 and 2, adults completed a set of four tasks of visual and auditory imagery and self-report measures of imagery. In Experiment 3, the set of imagery tasks was presented to 83 5-year-old children. Although children were less consistent in their imagery use than adults, there were interesting parallels between the children’s and adults’ performance. Across the 3 experiments, we found little or no relationship between static and dynamic imagery processes within the visual and auditory modalities. In contrast, significant correlations were observed across modality for dynamic imagery. These findings highlight the importance of examining cross-modality parallels in the development of imagery processes. Mental imagery is most often associated with vision, but imagery can occur in any sense modality. In particular, it is a common experience to hear voices, music, and other sounds with “the mind’s ear.” There are a number of interesting parallels between imagery in vision and imagery in audition [1-5]. For example, just as visual images contain information about perceived object