A Descriptive Analysis of Imagination Content
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although there has been significant research on imagination's effects and capabilities, there is relatively little exploration of the content of imagination. This qualitative, exploratory study explored the content of mental imagery and imagination in 23 undergraduates. Participants described what they imagined in response to five scene prompts, such as “food court” and “office.” The imaginings’ high prevalence of colour (96%), scene-relevant objects (83%), movement (64%), and clarity (81%) suggested real-world resemblance, aligning with episodic memory's role in imagination. On the other hand, half of the imaginings were described as realistic, and some realistic traits, such as first-person perspective (35%) and three-dimensionality (30%), were relatively rare. Cartoon-like (8%) and two-dimensional (10%) imagery was less common. Because little prior research has quantified imagination content, these percentages represent initial descriptive estimates rather than comparisons to established norms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".