Proposing a Visual Imagery Test

a measurement of visual imagery ability

Abstract

In increasingly common Internet on-line shopping situations, customers have no opportunity to inspect a real object and must generate the mental image of the goods they wish to purchase. Under these circumstances, the customers' feeling of satisfaction depends on their ability to generate a visual image of the object. This paper proposed a new test to measure human visual imagery ability and examined its reliability and validity through 3 studies. In Studies 1 and 2, the Visual Imagery Test(VIT) was proposed and its standardization with test-retest reliability was established. In Study 3, an attempt was made to demonstrate the relationship between a specific inner structure measured by the VIT and a daily-life imagery-related situation in order to examine the evidence of construct validity. Results showed that high test-retest reliability and some evidence of inner structural validity were attained successfully. In the future, further evidence of VIT validity should be investigated for effective use.