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Category: Project

Description: Goal-directed, intentional mental imagery generation supports a range of daily self-regulatory activities, such as planning, decision-making, and recreational escapism. The effectiveness of many clinical interventions for mood and anxiety disorders also directly scales with an individual’s ability to manipulate vividness and content of mental imagery. Music is effective at enhancing imagination, but basic questions remain regarding how music affects mental imagery and how it interacts with basic, well-established parameters, such as facilitatory effects of closing one’s eyes. One hundred participants listened to music and a silent control whilst performing a guided mental imagery task. Specifically, participants saw a short video of a figure journeying towards a landmark and imagined a continuation of the journey with either closed- or open-eyes. After each trial, participants reported vividness and content of their imagined journeys. Bayesian Mixed Effects models obtained strong evidence of greater vividness, duration, as well as distance travelled in music conditions compared to silent conditions. Additionally, interactive effects of music and eye closure were found for both vividness and the emotional valence of imagined content, where music effects were amplified more by eye closure. Findings further support music’s potential to manipulate the perceptual, spatial-temporal, as well as emotional sentiment of deliberately generated mental imagery.