How You Imagine Book Characters May Be Tied to Intrusive Thoughts

Some book characters refuse to stay on the page. Long after the final chapter, certain readers keep turning them over in their minds, wondering what a character would say next or how they’d handle a crisis. A new study of more than 800 readers finds that this habit of keeping a character alive tends to go hand in hand with something less expected: scoring higher on a standard measure of intrusive, unwanted thoughts. The research also mapped four separate sides to the reading imagination, from picturing scenes to hearing a book’s language to modeling characters as real people.

Behind the study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, is ReaderBank, a partnership between Durham University and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Scientists set out to answer a question that sounds simple but turns out to be surprisingly complicated: when people read fiction, what exactly happens in their heads? Some readers see vivid pictures. Others hear voices. Some feel like they’re standing inside the scene, while others watch from a distance, like a spectator. The team wanted to measure these differences instead of assuming everyone imagines stories the same way.

To test this, they built a quiz and tested it with hundreds of festival-goers and online readers over two years, refining it each round. The result was a 16-question quiz that measures four sides of the reading imagination. Each one connects to different mental habits, including daydreaming, immersion, and even the kinds of racing thoughts tied to mental health struggles.

Building a Reading Imagination Quiz at a Book Festival

Instead of running a typical lab experiment, the research team took their study to where readers already gather, the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Visitors could take the Imagination Quiz as a fun activity, answering questions about how they picture scenes, hear character voices, and relate to people in stories. Those willing to share more also completed longer surveys measuring things like visual imagination, unwanted thoughts, daydreaming habits, and how immersed they felt in fictional worlds.

Data collection occurred in three rounds. The first happened at the 2023 festival, where 95 usable responses came from people who completed both the quiz and the full survey. A second round moved online through a research recruitment platform, gathering 569 participants who confirmed they had read a fiction book within the past six months. A third round returned to the festival in 2024, added new questions, and collected data from 111 people who completed both the quiz and survey. Altogether, the project drew on 867 total responses.

Researchers ran statistical tests called factor analyses on the answers to see whether certain quiz questions clustered together in meaningful patterns. In the first two rounds, at the 2023 festival and in the online replication, a three-factor solution fit the data best, while a weaker fourth cluster, loosely tied to a reader’s perspective, kept surfacing without being solid enough to confirm. After revising the wording of several questions to better capture that emerging idea, the 2024 festival round supported a four-factor structure: one centered on seeing spaces and visual details, one on hearing the specific words and rhythm of the prose, one on building models of characters as people, and one on where the reader felt positioned relative to the story, whether inside a scene or watching it from outside.

Four Sides of the Reading Imagination

Space and vision, the ability to picture scenes and settings, was linked to standard tests of visual imagination and to a broader sense of getting swept away into a story. People strong in this category were more likely to report feeling immersed in fictional worlds and engaging in positive, constructive daydreaming rather than the kind marked by poor focus.

Voice and language covered awareness of specific wording, rhythm, and phrasing while reading. Oddly, this factor did not line up strongly with general hearing-based imagination. That suggests noticing a book’s language may be less about literally hearing sounds and more about inner speech, the quiet voice people use to talk to themselves.

People models captured something more social: imagining how a character would behave in a new situation, thinking about what they’d say, or comparing them to someone in real life. This factor showed the clearest connection to a questionnaire measuring intrusive and unwanted thoughts. Readers who scored high on building these character models also tended to report more of these uninvited mental intrusions. Researchers noted this may relate to an experience some readers describe: continuing to think about a character, almost as if that character keeps existing, even after finishing the book.

Perspective, the newest and least developed of the four categories, captured whether readers felt positioned inside a character’s viewpoint or observing from outside. This category was less consistent across the study and needs more research before researchers can draw firm conclusions.

Why the Character-Building Style Stands Out

None of the four imagination styles worked on its own. People models connected to emotional and body-based imagination, supporting the idea that building a mental version of a character draws on empathy and physical sensation, not just abstract thinking. That same factor also tracked with immersion and positive daydreaming, meaning readers who model characters as living, reactive people tend to feel most absorbed in a story’s world.

That tie to intrusive thoughts stood out because it appeared in more than one round of the study. Researchers noted that scoring high on this imagination style is not automatically a sign of anything troubling, since building models of other people is a normal and useful social skill. Even so, the overlap with intrusive thought measures raises questions worth exploring further, particularly because similar imaginative processes come up in discussions of certain mental health conditions where people struggle with racing or uncontrollable thoughts.

What This Means for Readers

These findings challenge the assumption that a strong reading imagination simply means seeing vivid pictures in the mind’s eye. Two people can read the exact same page and walk away with completely different inner experiences, one absorbed in visual scenery, another quietly modeling how a character thinks and feels long after the chapter ends. That second kind of imagination, built around people rather than pictures, seems to carry its own psychological weight, tied to unwanted, persistent thoughts that are harder to switch off. In the end, reading is not one experience but several running side by side, and figuring out which one dominates for a given person may matter for how that person processes stories, memories, and even their own mind.