Welcome to the VMSQ
(Vividness of Mental Senses Questionnaire)
Alec Figueroa, 2025
This is a custom reworking of the illustrious Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. After accumulating 7 years of experience in working with individuals to either grow or strengthen their ability to visually imagine, I have taken the concepts presented in the original VVIQ and expanded upon them, introducing several new measurement points as well as a different flow to the process. The VMSQ will not only measure the aspect of visual thought, but also other mental senses.
​Instructions
Each section will present you with a short audio track to listen to. The objective here is to sit back, close your eyes, relax, and intently listen to the narration. Each narration will describe a different scene in detail, mentioning different senses that would be present in the scenario. While you listen, don't feel pressure to force your mind to produce anything in particular, just relax and lightly observe what you experience. After listening to the track, open your eyes and reflect on what you experienced in your thoughts while listening to the track.
After reflecting on the scenario, proceed to fill in a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being only thinking in words of the item in question, 10 being as if you were there in a present and first-person moment) on each subject line. You are rating how clearly you can think of the mental sense in question, not necessarily how clearly you physically experience the item in question (in other words, we are not measuring physical hallucinations, as in prophantasia. In the case of visual imagination, the black space when you close your eyes should remain black, as this is normal).
Upon completing the questionnaire, the system will add up your total from each section and provide you a score. These scores are not yet meant to give you any meaningful insight or diagnosis, rather they are feedback for you to reflect on. There are 4 sections, each containing 1 audio track and 8 questions.
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Rating Scale
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No sense of sensory thought whatsoever.
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Maybe sensory, maybe not? Hard to say.
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Vague, dim, yet present in some manner.
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Sensory components starting to come together, but still very vague.
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Sensory thoughts are clearly conscious, but moderately vague.
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The thought is clearly sensory in nature, but still a bit vague.
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Sensory thought is present, but certain details still absent.
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Sensory thought is present, and quite vivid.
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Very vivid sensory thought, only slightly missing full realism.
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Incredibly vivid sensory thought, just like the physical sense itself.
Note: If you'd like to reference this rating scale again at any point, please click the "rating scale" button in the header of these pages.
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