EIDETIC IMAGERY

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. Photographic memory is the general claim that people can "still see in front of them" things that were experienced in the past. Eidetic imagery, on the other hand, is more closely tied to objective experimental criteria.

A generation of German investigations of eidetic imagery in the early years of the twentieth century (Woodworth, 1938, p. 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. The silence was broken in 1964 by publication of a paper by R. N. Haber and R. B. Haber (see also later summaries in Haber, 1979, and accompanying commentaries). Their report launched modern research on eidetic imagery and largely sustained conclusions from the continental work of a generation earlier.

Haber and Haber (1964) studied 150 elementary-school children in a standardized testing situation. 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. 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. 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. These twelve children were discontinuous with their classmates in the 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. 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. 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). Thus, the incidence of eidetic skill in the original survey was 8 percent (12/150). 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).

In subsequent work (Leask et al., 1969) the "fusion method" was used to identify eidetic imagers. This method presents two individually meaningless pictures successively. 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. The pictures are designed so that this superposition yields a meaningful picture. Children identified by the criteria above to be possessors of eidetic imagery could perform this task, whereas normal children could not.

Age

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Brain Damage

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. 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. Leask and colleagues (1969) showed no evidence for mental retardation among their eidetic children, but they did observe more minor visual defects (wearing glasses) among the eidetic than among the noneidetic children. Siipola and Hayden (1965) tested mentally retarded children and found incidence rates of about fifty percent, a strikingly higher figure than among the comparable nonretarded population. Furthermore, eidetic imagery was a marker, among these children, for "organic" as opposed to "familial" diagnoses of retardation. Other investigators (Gummerman et al., 1972; Richardson and Cant, 1970; Symmes, 1971) have, however, reported many fewer cases among retardates of all types. But Giray and colleagues (1976) found even a higher incidence (78.5 percent of fourteen cases) in hydrocephalic children and only a "normal" rate (5 percent to 10 percent) among children with other forms of mental retardation. The force of these tantalizing observations is not yet clear.

Cross-Cultural Approaches

In the context of eidetic imagery as a developmentally primitive information storage mode, Doob (1966) supposed that primitive, illiterate societies might show a higher incidence of it, even among adults. An initial report did, as expected from this reasoning, show a high incidence using the Habers' criteria among the Ibo of Nigeria. However, Doob's further research was disappointing: He had expected that within the Ibo population, the incidence of eidetic imagery would be greater in truly remote, agrarian settlements than in more modern, urbanized population centers, but this was not the case.

Conclusion

The most important conclusion about eidetic imagery is that it is a genuine phenomenon, capable of objective measurement and study. Moreover, the skill has been distinguished from such related phenomena as iconic memory, sensory afterimages, and extremely accurate memory (but see Gray and Gummerman, 1975, for reservations on this last point). Eidetic imagery is characteristic of a minority of young children and is probably related to some forms of brain disorders. It is rather certainly not the agency for good memory of detail, as the Habers (1964) showed originally. Thus, systematic work on eidetic imagery indicates that it shares practically nothing with the popular concept of photographic memory. The apparent absence of eidetic imagery among adults and the fact that it is not predictive of particularly good memory for detail make it a poor basis for claims of photographic memory.

See also:CODING PROCESSES: IMAGERY

Bibliography

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Robert G.Crowder