This subject has a few important questions to pose right away.
Is imagination a skill?
This is an important question to ask because a lot of things people presume can be trained and improved just cant. Intelligence (However you measure it), for instance, hasn’t been shown to improve upon training, although that doesn’t stop people from trying with ‘brain games’ and whatnot. Knowledge and understanding can be improved, but speed at understanding material and problem-solving hasn’t shown to budge very much beyond eliminating confounding factors (CO2, for instance, has shown to decline cognitive function significantly in many cases. So if your environment is stuffy, an open window or two can /really/ help you think).
There is some pretty clear evidence of it. Andrea Blomkvist showed in a paper “Imagination as a skill: A Bayesian proposal ()” that it was a skill (Before considering a Bayesian model for how it’s structured, hence the name of the paper) by providing data that it has the qualities of “(i) improvability by practice, and (ii) control”, which sounds like a pretty good definition. For i, he cites multiple studies showing it is true of mental rotation, and for ii, he argues that control over imagination has to do with your ability to work around and with different kinds of constraints, and studies which show that people are able to do that.
Impact on memory
Mnemonic systems
This being my original reason for making this page One of the core components in a mnemonic system is having the ability to imagine things vibrantly. It doesn’t exactly have to be visual — but the more senses one can involve, the more reaction one might have to a thing, the better.
This is involved in both the Linking Method, where something is imagined strongly and then linked to other things and the Method of Loci, where something is imagined strongly and then placed in a memorized route.
Putting aside that these techniques are only good for objects, and you’d need something like the PAO system for other kinds of things, it’s clear that in order to make use of these memory systems(And perhaps to have a good memory in general), you’re required to strengthen and enhance your own imagination. Everybody can imagine (Even those who aren’t capable of visualizing)