Perhaps people are answering with figures for vividity relative to expectations in some sense.
[EDITED to add:] A specific sense of “relative to expectations” that I think is probably the main thing that’s going on here: Vision is an extremely high-bandwidth sense, hearing decidedly less so. If there’s limited bandwidth / processing available for synthesizing imaginary/remembered sense experiences, then we should expect visual experiences to fall further short than auditory ones.
(Of course that’s an oversimplification. E.g., just how high that bandwidth would need to be may depend on what “level of processing” the imagined/remembered experiences get fed in at; we may be constructing fine details on demand and not notice; etc.)
Perhaps people are answering with figures for vividity relative to expectations in some sense.
[EDITED to add:] A specific sense of “relative to expectations” that I think is probably the main thing that’s going on here: Vision is an extremely high-bandwidth sense, hearing decidedly less so. If there’s limited bandwidth / processing available for synthesizing imaginary/remembered sense experiences, then we should expect visual experiences to fall further short than auditory ones.
(Of course that’s an oversimplification. E.g., just how high that bandwidth would need to be may depend on what “level of processing” the imagined/remembered experiences get fed in at; we may be constructing fine details on demand and not notice; etc.)