The same novel can spark very different inner worlds in readers
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Every storybook opens a window for our imagination to be freed from the reality of the world around us and escape into the fictional world. While the author’s words act as a guide, everyone experiences fiction in their own way, creating vivid mental pictures and even forming an emotional connection with the characters.
A new study from Durham University and the Edinburgh International Book Festival introduces the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz (RBIQ), created to explore how differently each of us imagines while reading. It asks readers what goes on inside their heads as they turn the pages: whether they visualize scenes, hear character voices or think about how characters would act in real-life situations.
The survey results pointed to a much more complex picture of reading imagination than just seeing the story in your mind’s eye. It is a combination of four separate subscales: space and vision, voice and language, people models, and perspective.
How people perceived fiction also gave insight into other psychological traits. For instance, readers who pictured scenes more vividly and built detailed mental models of characters tended to feel more immersed in the story and engage in constructive daydreaming. Character modeling, on the other hand, was associated with more intrusive or unwanted thoughts in both 2023 study samples.
The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.
Beyond the mind’s eye
Consuming creative media, such as reading fiction, triggers the imaginative bug in our brains. Some people can conjure up vivid pictures in their minds, while others struggle to visualize anything at all. The differences in imagination have also been linked to variations in how people remember their personal experiences.
However, reading fiction is a multidimensional experience that goes beyond pictures in our heads. It includes the words we hear or read, the emotions we feel and our ability to understand other people. Most cognitive studies have tested imagination in artificial lab settings, leaving a gap in our understanding of how it works when people immerse themselves in creative works.
To explore how imagination works when people read, beyond the confines of a lab, researchers in this study developed the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz (RBIQ), a 16-item questionnaire designed to capture different aspects of the reading experience. They tested it with 867 participants across two Edinburgh International Book Festivals and an online study conducted in 2023–2024.
Readers rated how often they experienced specific mental phenomena on a five-point scale, from picturing spatial details and hearing the rhythm of prose to anticipating characters’ reactions and shifting between narrative viewpoints. As part of this experiment, participants also completed standard psychological questionnaires.
Four forces of reading imagination
The researchers found that imagination while reading has four distinct dimensions. Space and vision shaped how readers picture a story’s settings, landscapes and spatial layouts. Voice and language captured the inner voice readers hear as they follow a story, from the rhythm of the prose to the sound of character dialogue.
People models involved imagining how characters might react in real-life situations and thinking about them after finishing the book. Perspective was about where one stands in the story: stepping into a first-person view, stepping back to watch events unfold as an outside observer or even shifting between the two.
These four dimensions often worked together, and each brought something different to the reading experience. Also, getting lost in a book was unrelated to poor attention control, suggesting that immersion is an active, focused process rather than passive distraction.
The researchers highlighted that even when two people engage with the same text, reading can spark very different imaginative experiences, depending on how they picture its world, get inside its characters’ heads and respond to its language. Through the Imagination Quiz and other ReaderBank studies, the team hopes to understand how these different forces work together to shape the reading experience.
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Publication details
Georgia Punton et al., The forces of the imagination: exploring dimensions of mental imagery using the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz, Royal Society Open Science (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.260390
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The same novel can spark very different inner worlds in readers (2026, October 22)
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