How vivid your voluntary visual imagery is, on the scale the whole modern aphantasia literature is built on.
Before you start, the direction of the scale
1 means no image at all. 5 means as vivid as actually seeing it. So a low total means low
vividness. Marks’ original questionnaire ran the other way up, and VVIQ-2 reversed it; nearly all
the aphantasia-era literature uses the reversed direction and so does this page. A score quoted the
wrong way round is not a small error — it is the opposite result.
Sixteen items, four scenes, about five minutes. You are asked once, eyes open, which is
the usual modern online administration. Marks administered each scene twice — eyes open, then eyes
closed — so a score from here is not interchangeable with one from that version.
This result will never be worded as: “You have aphantasia.” — it is not a
diagnosis, does not clear you for anything, and buys you nothing here or anywhere.
Your key
Your browser made you a random key. We store a one-way hash of it, never the key. It is the only
thing linking this sitting to your next one — write it down. Without it we cannot delete your
entries later, because we will have no way to know which ones are yours.
…
Before you start
Under a minute. None of it is required, every question can be skipped, and
"prefer not to say" is recorded as itself rather than turned into a default. This is not
part of the exam and nothing here is scored.
The questionnaire
What this number is not
It is not a diagnosis.It is a self-report of a trait, which is not the
same thing as the trait. Self-reported vividness moves with mood, fatigue and expectation.
There is no agreed cut-off.Different research groups use different
thresholds for the same construct. We print the landmarks with their sources and no verdict.
It says nothing about your other senses.Andrade et al. (2014) found
imagery modalities do not collapse into a single factor — a person can have no visual imagery and
vivid auditory, emotional or bodily imagery. The instrument that shows that is the Psi-Q, and we
have not built it yet. Rather than let a visual number stand in for an inner life, we say so.
One sitting is a reading.Come back in a fortnight with the same key.
The pair is the result.
Where this comes from
Marks, D.F. (1973), British Journal of Psychology 64(1):17–24 — the VVIQ.
Marks, D.F. (1995) — VVIQ-2, which reversed the scale direction.
Zeman et al. (2020), Cortex 130:426–440 — the imagery-extremes study.
Zeman, A. (2024), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 28(5) — the current review.
The sixteen items are Marks (1973), reproduced from the published appendix for free,
non-commercial research use. VVIQ-2’s thirty-two items are not reproduced here.
The rules this page is bound by
Report the measurement, not the category."Your VVIQ score was 19 out of 80. Scores at or below 24 are the range in which most published aphantasia research recruits participants." Never "you have aphantasia."
Name the reference class, every time.A percentile is meaningless without saying among whom. Ours is: among people who found this page and chose to take the test. That group is systematically enriched for exactly the traits being measured, because people who suspect something about themselves go looking.
Consistency, not confidence.For every instrument the second administration is part of the instrument. A one-shot result is a reading, not a finding.
Never route a result to anything consequential.No credential tier, no karma weight, no grant eligibility, no payment. The moment a score buys something, people optimise it and the data dies.