Hot off the press!
Today marks the release of our first pre-print publication from ReaderBank, a study of reading, the imagination, and mental health undertaken in collaboration with Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Authored by Georgia Punton, Marco Bernini, John Foxwell, Nick Barley and Ben Alderson-Day, The Forces of the Imagination shares the study’s first findings, introducing the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz (RBIQ) as a new tool for exploring the imagination and its implications for mental health.
About the study:
The team surveyed 867 adults at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2023 and 2024, with a third group participating online. Participants answered questions about their reading habits, preferences, and how they experience stories – from visualising scenes and hearing voices, to feeling physical sensations and emotional impact.
The quiz identified four “forces” of imagination – space and vision, voice and language, people models, and perspective – and revealed the complexity and diversity of people’s reading minds.
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?
Professor Ben Alderson-Day, Project Lead
This is just the first study in our ongoing project, and the ReaderBank team are excited to build on these findings as they continue to develop the RBIQ into a tool that could support and enhance mental health treatments.
Find out more:
Read the pre-print research paper in full.
Visit the ReaderBank website to take the Imagination Quiz and explore our new modules on understanding reading experiences, how the imagination works, and what this means for mental health.
