Abstract / Summary
Visual perspective is a core feature of autobiographical remembering, yet relatively little is known about stable individual differences in the tendency to remember events from own-eyes (OE) and observer-like (OB) perspectives. The present study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Visual Perspective Questionnaire (VPQ), a brief four-item measure of OE and OB tendencies. Data were drawn from 15,043 undergraduate students, with convergent validity analyses conducted in a subsample of 1,712 participants. Reliability analyses supported scoring the VPQ as separate OE and OB dimensions. Simulation-based comparisons further revealed that the observed joint distribution of OE and OB more closely resembled a relatively independent framework than continuum or mutually exclusive alternatives. Extreme-profile analyses identified all four combinations of OE and OB, including high OE-high OB and low OE-low OB configurations that are difficult to accommodate within a strictly bipolar account. In the validation sample, OE and OB showed modest associations with object and spatial imagery, providing additional evidence of convergence with broader imagery tendencies. Together, the findings provide initial support for the VPQ as a brief measure of individual differences in visual perspective in autobiographical memory, and suggest that OE and OB are better represented as separate, coexisting dimensions than as opposite ends of a single continuum.