A new tool to understand how people imagine differently when reading could have potential implications for the treatment of mental ill health.
The ReaderBank Imagination Quiz has been developed by an interdisciplinary team, including experts from our Institute for Medical Humanities and the departments of Psychology and English Studies.
The quiz identifies four “forces” of imagination - space and vision, voice and language, people models, and perspective.
These forces have strong and specific connections to mental imagery, immersion in a story, daydreaming, and intrusive thoughts.
This shows the complexity of people’s reading minds and what the researchers say is a radical diversity of imagination skills.
Understanding how different people respond to reading could provide a greater insight into how their imaginations work.
This could eventually allow for mental health therapies to be better adapted to the individual.
Lots of psychotherapy methods rely on the imagination, but we never screen people for what kind of imagination they have. This tool, which is nominally about reading, is about offering a window on that diversity of imagination. Our end goal is thinking how can we use these sorts of tools to inform more precise, more detailed pictures of how psychotherapy is going to work?
Researchers quizzed 867 adults on their reading experiences across two Edinburgh International Book Festivals in 2023 and 2024. A third group took part online.
They completed questions about reading habits, including how much and how frequently they read books, preferred types of books or e-books, and most read genres.
Other questions were aimed at how people visualised what they were reading, such as faces and scenes, and how they experienced inner speech or physical and sensory feelings.
The quiz also looked at how conscious readers were of what they were reading and the impact this had on them.
This is the first study of an on-going project. The team hopes to do more research to develop the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz as a tool that could enhance and supplement mental ill health treatments.
The project demonstrates the transformative power and value of medical humanities approaches in our understanding of health and human experience.
Read the full pre-print research paper. This paper was presented at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
ReaderBank is a collaboration between Durham University and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The study included researchers from our Institute for Medical Humanities, departments of Psychology and English Studies, and the National Poetry Centre in Leeds, and was funded by Wellcome.
Find out more about Transformative Humanities at Durham
Our Department of Psychology is ranked 84th in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025. Visit our Psychology webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
Our Department of English Studies is ranked 33rd in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025. Visit our English Studies webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
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