The Internal Representations Questionnaire: Measuring modes of thinking

Does the format in which we experience our moment-to-moment thoughts vary from person to person? Many people strongly endorse that their thinking takes place in an inner voice and that using language outside of interpersonal communication is a regular experience for them. Other people disagree. We present a novel measure, the Internal Representation Questionnaire (IRQ) designed to assess people’s subjective mode of internal representations, and to quantify individual differences in “modes of thinking” along multiple factors in a single questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis identified four factors: propensity to verbalize, visual imagery, orthographic imagery, and representational manipulation. All four factors were positively correlated, but accounted for unique predictions. We describe the properties of the IRQ and report a test of its ability to predict patterns of interference in a speeded word-picture verification task. Taken together, the results suggest that self-reported differences in how people “think” relate to differences in processing familiar images and text.