RUNNING HEAD: MENTAL IMAGERY IN MUSICIANS Auditory and Visual Mental Imagery in Musicians and Nonmusicians Francesca Talamini1,2, Julia Vigl1, Elizabeth Doerr2, Massimo Grassi2, Barbara Carretti2 1Institute of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Austria 2Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Italy Corresponding author: Francesca Talamini, email: [email protected] ABSTRACT The present research investigated auditory and visual mental imagery and how this ability differs in people with and without musical training. In a first part, the characteristics of a new auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Vividness of Auditory Imagery Questionnaire, VAIQ) were reported. The questionnaire was composed of 16 items assessing mental vividness of auditory everyday sounds and it was administered to 147 participants, demonstrating good psychometric properties. In a second part, self-reported vividness of auditory and visual images was assessed in people with and without music expertise. Thirty-six formally trained musicians, 33 self-taught musicians, and 33 nonmusicians completed the questionnaires. The newly built questionnaire VAIQ and the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks, 1973) were administered. Music aptitude and general cognitive abilities were also assessed in all participants as control measures. We observed that both groups of musicians self-reported greater vividness of mental imagery for auditory nonmusical sounds than nonmusicians, but not for visual images. The study confirmed that music expertise is linked to enhanced self-reported auditory mental imagery for everyday sounds, illustrating that such advantage is selective for auditory imagery; no difference concerning visual imagery between the groups of musicians and nonmusicians emerged. Keywords: musicians and nonmusicians; auditory imagery; visual imagery; VVIQ Introduction A mental image is an internally generated representation of an object, event or sensation. In contrast to perception, it happens when perceptual information is accessed from memory and is often described as ‘seeing with the mind’s eye’ or ‘hearing with the mind’s ear’ (Kosslyn, Ganis, & Thompson, 2001), depending on the sensory modality. Mental images can be internally generated as representations of things, experiences or scenes (Schifferstein, 2009) allowing people to recreate the past and simulate the future (Moulton & Kosslyn, 2009). Here, the term "vividness" refers to how clearly and real an image is experienced (McAvinue & Robertson, 2007). Mental imagery plays a functional role in various contexts involving cognitive resources such as memory, learning, spatial representation and reasoning. For instance, imagery is an effective method for promoting medical adherence (Liu & Park, 2004); indeed, people who mentally implement through imagination specific health procedures they intend to carry out are more likely to perform the procedure more accurately and constantly, also for an extended period of time. Mental imagery is also related to increased involvement in planned behavior and promotion of task engagement (Renner, Murphy, Manly, & Holmes, 2019; Vasquez & Buehler, 2007), more effective learning outcomes (Guarnera, Pellerone, Commadari, Valenti, & Buccheri, 2019), positive mood training (Holmes, Mathews, Dalgleish, & Mackintosh, 2006), improved sports performance (Mizuguchi et al., 2012), motor control (Isaac & Marks, 1994) and plays a major role in the field of music (Aleman, Nieuwenstein, Böcker, & de Haan, 2000; Brochard, Dufour, & Després, 2004; Brown & Palmer, 2013). Although many studies focus on visual mental imagery, which is also the modality with the highest vividness ratings (Schifferstein, 2009), it is known from literature that mental imagery can have all other kinds of sensory forms (e.g. tactile, olfactory, motor, or auditory, see Andrade, May, Deeprose, Baugh, & Ganis, 2014). The vividness of mental images depends not only on the sensory and affective qualities of the imagined stimulus (Bywaters, Andreade, & Turpin, 2004), or the capacity of short-term and long-term memory systems (Baddeley & Andrade, 2000), but also on personal experience in different areas. Isaac and Marks (1994) showed that specific expert groups, such as elite athletes, physical education students, air traffic controllers and pilots, reported more vivid visual and movements imagery than matched controls. Mental imagery in musicians Musicians are often regarded as a model for studying brain and behavioural changes after a prolonged and intense training (Schlaug, 2001; Münte, Altenmüller, & Jäncke, 2002). Music training implies a high cognitive load, caused by the integration of information coming from different sources, planning and execution of appropriate motor actions (Sergent, 1993). In order to plan any musical performance it is important to create a mental representation and imagine a desired interpretation (Holmes, 2005). In the case of music, these representations are mostly auditory images generated in the anticipation of actual auditory feedback (Bishop, Bailes, & Dean, 2013a; Keller & Koch, 2008). Musicians use mental imagery as part of their typical learning and performing routines, or when reading written music silently (Bailes, 2006; Bishop, Bailes & Dean, 2014; Brodsky, Kessler, Rubinstein, Ginsborg, & Henik, 2008; Gregg, Clark, & Hall, 2008). When musicians are mentally practicing, they use visual, acoustic and kinesthetic imagery. Mental imagery can help in the creation of anticipatory images enabling action planning and movement execution (Keller, 2012), thus gaining an enhanced expressive and interpretive understanding of the musical piece (Connolly & Williamon, 2004). In ensembles, it facilitates interpersonal coordination through simulating one’s own and other’s actions during the performance (Keller & Appel, 2010; Pecenka & Keller, 2009). Mental imagery could also enhance music compositional creativity (Wong & Lim, 2017). Therefore, it is not surprising that some studies found that musicians possess better auditory imagery abilities than nonmusicians, for both musical and nonmusical sounds, either at a behavioral level and at brain activity level (Aleman et al., 2000; Herholz, Lappe, Knief, & Pantev, 2008; Bishop, Bailes, & Dean, 2013b). These findings raise the question whether musicians have a generally stronger imagery or whether this ability mainly concerns the auditory domain. Only few studies tried to verify if this advantage of mental imagery in musicians could be selective for auditory stimuli or not, with some results supporting a general advantage (i.e., enhanced visual imagery in musicians vs nonmusicians, Brochard et al., 2004), and some supporting a selective auditory advantage (Aleman et al., 2000). The advantage of musicians in auditory imagery tasks might be explained by their use of mental imagery when practicing (Gregg et al., 2008), by the possible positive effects of musical training on cognitive functions (for a review see Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2019), or by their more effective processing of imagery representations in auditory cortical areas (Aleman et al., 2000). Mental imagery can be measured in different ways; one of the most common approaches is to use self- report questionnaires such as the Vividness on Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks, 1973), the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire (Andrade, May, Deeprose, Baugh & Ganis, 2014 ), the Movement Imagery Questionnaire (Hall & Martin, 1997) or the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale (Nelis et al., 2014). Another option is to evaluate mental imagery through objective testing, where imagery is needed to obtain the right solution (e.g., Aleman et al., 2000; Brochard et al., 2004). As mentioned earlier, it still remains unclear whether musicians possess general enhanced mental imagery abilities, or selective for auditory stimuli, and if these enhanced abilities could also emerge in self- report questionnaires about vividness. Pfordresher and Halpern (2013) found that people with higher self-reported vividness of imagery are more likely to sing in tune than those with lower imagery. A recent research by Di Nuovo and Angelica (2016) showed that trained and expert musicians self- reported more vivid motor imagery compared to untrained counterparts. Campos and Fuentes (2016) found that music-students self-reported higher mental imagery clarity of cutaneous, kinaesthetic, gustatory, visual, and auditory imagery vividness scores than students of other subjects. However, another study, which examined only musicians, could not find any connection between musical experience and self-reported vividness of visual imagery (Clark & Williamon, 2012). Objectives of the study Due to the ambiguous results from previous studies, we wanted to take a closer look at whether musicians differ from nonmusicians in terms of visual and auditory imagery, specifically for what concerns the self-reported vividness of mental imagery. To do so, in the first part of our study we created a new self-report questionnaire assessing auditory mental imagery for everyday sounds (the VAIQ). We selected sounds that are well known by the majority of people and not specific to the music domain (e.g., the sound of teeth brushing, for the complete list of the sounds see Appendix A1). The questionnaire was modeled on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire VVIQ (Marks, 1973), as our purpose was to have comparable measures of visual and auditory mental imagery. The VVIQ was chosen