Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many people report experiencing their thoughts in the form ofnatural language, i.e., they experience ‘inner speech’. Atpresent, there exist few ways of quantifying this tendency,making it difficult to investigate whether the propensity toexperience verbalize predicts objective cognitive function orwhether it is merely epiphenomenal. We present a newinstrument —The Internal Representation Questionnaire(IRQ) —for quantifying the subjective format of internalthoughts. The primary goal of the IRQ is to assess whetherpeople vary in their stated use of visual and verbal strategies intheir internal representations. Exploratory analyses revealedfour factors: Propensity to form visual images, verbal images,a general mental manipulation factor, and an orthographicimagery factor. Here, we describe the properties of the IRQ andreport an initial test of its predictive validity by relating it to aspeeded picture/word verification task involving pictorial,written, and auditory verbal cues.