Although Haber (1979) had been unimpressed with the evidence favoring such a view, the many peer commentaries following his article demonstrate that the point is at least controversial. The suggestion that eidetic imagery varies inversely with age (up to the college years) indicated that it might be a marker for retarded development within any age group. This possibility places the interpretation of high eidetic skill among young children in a different light: These young individuals might be especially likely to show eidetic imagery not because of their age but because of the functional level of their brains. Recent evidence (Giray et al., 1985 Zelhart et al., 1985) suggests that the eidetic skill increases in geriatric populations and that the true relation between age and the incidence of eidetic imagery should be U-shaped. The decline in eidetic skills with age is well documented (Haber, 1979 Leask et al., 1969 Richardson and Harris, 1986) they are apparently virtually absent among adults. Fifteen children (5.6 percent) were identified as eidetic, but a clear relation to age emerged: Nine of these fifteen were either five-or six-years old, and only a single subject was over ten. Giray and colleagues (1976) examined 280 children, twenty at every age from five-to eighteen-years old, using the Habers's (Haber and Haber, 1964) criteria. Children identified by the criteria above to be possessors of eidetic imagery could perform this task, whereas normal children could not. The pictures are designed so that this superposition yields a meaningful picture. After display of the first, the second picture is presented on the same surface, with the subject instructed to superimpose his or her image of the first picture upon the second. This method presents two individually meaningless pictures successively. In subsequent work (Leask et al., 1969) the 'fusion method' was used to identify eidetic imagers. A survey using similar criteria by Paivio and Cohen (1979), on 242 second-and third-grade children, gave excellent agreement on the incidence of eidetic imagery in normal schoolchildren-8.6 percent (21/242). Thus, the incidence of eidetic skill in the original survey was 8 percent (12/150). In visual scanning (eye movements across the blank easel where the eidetic image was 'projected'), the difference was even larger (100 percent versus 2 percent). For example, positive coloration was an average of 90 percent in the group of twelve but an average of only 34 percent in the remaining seventy-two children. Presence of positive coloration, duration of the images, use of the present tense to describe images, and visual scanning (of the blank surface) during the interview after each picture. These twelve children were discontinuous with their classmates in the Although more than half the children (84/150) reported at least some kind of imagery for the presented picture, there was considerable variability in scores on these eight measures: In particular, a group of twelve children was easily distinguished from the other seventy-two who had indicated some imagery. Eight measures were collected, such as whether they saw an image, how long it lasted, whether the image description used positive coloration (rather than complementary colors, as in afterimages), and whether it was described in the present tense. The children were shown a set of four coherent pictures for thirty seconds apiece and interviewed immediately after each as to what they 'saw' on a blank easel in the same location as the picture had been. Haber and Haber (1964) studied 150 elementary-school children in a standardized testing situation.

Their report launched modern research on eidetic imagery and largely sustained conclusions from the continental work of a generation earlier. Haber (see also later summaries in Haber, 1979, and accompanying commentaries). The silence was broken in 1964 by publication of a paper by R.

45) was largely ignored at mid-century when American psychology was dominated by theoretical behaviorism and had, at best, no use for the concept of imagery. Eidetic imagery, on the other hand, is more closely tied to objective experimental criteria.Ī generation of German investigations of eidetic imagery in the early years of the twentieth century (Woodworth, 1938, p. Photographic memory is the general claim that people can 'still see in front of them' things that were experienced in the past. Nothing captures better the popular belief in 'photographic memory' than the term eidetic imagery, although the latter hardly supports the exaggerated claims made for the former capacity.

People with eidetic memory