The Visual Imagery Visually Anchored Scale (VIVAS) reveals dissociable perceptual dimensions and category-specific structure

Visual imagery varies widely across individuals, from aphantasia (no imagery) to hyperphantasia (highly vivid imagery), yet most measurement tools rely on verbal self-report with limited external anchoring. We introduce the Visual Imagery Visually Anchored Scale (VIVAS), which asks participants to reconstruct their mental images of objects from six categories (animals, buildings, faces, food, manmade objects, and novel objects) along three perceptual dimensions (opacity, sharpness, and color saturation) using visually presented anchors. VIVAS was administered to a probability-based panel randomly selected from the National Registry of Iceland; 205 completed the study and were included in analyses. VIVAS dimensions were highly related but not interchangeable: individual differences in color imagery reliably dissociated from those of opacity and sharpness, which suggests that visual imagery partly separates into its structural clarity and chromaticity. Imagery also differed systematically across categories. Novel objects elicited the weakest imagery on all three dimensions, which highlights a central role for familiarity in shaping imagery strength. In contrast, food items showed selectively enhanced color imagery, consistent with the functional importance of color for evaluating edibility and with the overlap between food- and color-selective regions in visual cortex. The structural clarity of imagery showed minimal category specificity beyond familiarity effects. VIVAS total scores did not differ by gender, age, education, or device type, consistent with robustness for online administration. Participants’ evaluations of VIVAS were generally favorable. VIVAS correlated moderately with the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), well below the ceiling set by each instrument's reliability, and individual-level dissociations were striking: some participants scoring in the bottom 10% on one measure fell in the top quartile on the other. Verbal and visually anchored measures therefore appear to capture complementary, and sometimes divergent, facets of imagery, with implications for how aphantasia and hyperphantasia are defined and identified. Together, these findings position VIVAS as a reliable, visually grounded complement to existing verbal questionnaires. VIVAS captures both overall imagery strength as well as meaningful dimension- and category-specific structure that standard self-report tools cannot easily assess.