Eidetic Memory

Eidetic memory, often called photographic memory in popular usage, is the reported ability to recall an image, scene, or page of text in extremely vivid and precise detail after only a brief exposure, as though the person were still looking directly at it rather than remembering it. The psychologist Ralph Norman Haber conducted the most influential systematic research into the phenomenon during the 1960s and 1970s, testing children by briefly showing them a picture and then asking them to describe or scan details of the image as though it were still visible in front of them projected onto a blank surface; Haber found that a small minority of children, and almost no adults, produced descriptions detailed and consistent enough to meet a strict definition of true eidetic imagery. Genuine eidetic memory of this rigorously defined kind is considered rare and appears to decline sharply with age, and the most famous purported adult case, a woman referred to in the literature by the pseudonym Elizabeth, studied by Charles Stromeyer and Joseph Psotka in 1970 and reported able to fuse two separate random-dot stereogram images from memory taken minutes apart, was never independently replicated in later testing and remains scientifically contested. Because the term is often used loosely in everyday speech to describe anyone with an unusually strong memory, psychologists distinguish true eidetic imagery, which is a rare and specific visual phenomenon typically confined to childhood, from ordinary highly superior autobiographical memory or well-practiced mnemonic skill, neither of which involves the same reported sensory vividness.