
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.
