Elissa Aminoff¹ (), Anya McGoldrick¹; ¹Fordham University

Mental imagery ability varies across individuals. How pervasive these individual differences are across different cognitions is unknown. The medial parietal region, which includes the retrosplenial cortex, has been linked to mental imagery. We predicted that performance in other cognitive abilities linked to this brain region would correlate with mental imagery ability. If so, this would suggest a more fundamental source of individual differences may lie within differences in medial parietal/retrosplenial functioning rather than in mental imagery. To test this, we examined 189 participants from the general population. Their imagery capabilities were correlated to scores in memory, scene perception, virtual navigation, and an unrelated control task of lexical decision-making. Those with better mental imagery performed significantly better on the memory test and had faster reaction times during scene perception, with similar accuracy. The virtual navigation task yielded null results, which contradicted the self-reported navigation results in the memory questionnaire and was concluded to be a design error. The control condition – the lexical decision task – did not correlate with mental imagery, strengthening the study's findings that activity in the medial parietal/retrosplenial accounts for these differences. The study suggests that differences in mental imagery ability may be related to differences in medial parietal/retrosplenial functioning more generally, manifesting in correlated differences in other cognitions that utilize the same brain region. However, more research, especially using fMRI, is needed to explore what role this brain region has in imagery and the potential role of imagery in related cognitions such as memory and scene perception.