Photographic memory

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Photographic memory ” is a colloquial term that is not used consistently to describe certain memory functions . In general, the term describes the ability of a person to remember details of a certain event, which is stored in the form of visual perceptions . The person concerned has the impression of seeing the event as if in a photo. However, a photographic memory in this sense does not exist.

Often the eidetic memory (from eidetic ) is referred to as photographic memory; this is due to its function.

Eidetic memory

In psychology , the technical terms used are iconic memory and eidetic memory . Iconic memory refers to the short-term storage of (exact) visual information in sensory memory, which covers a period of several hundred milliseconds. In some (rare) cases, however, people can store the detailed visual information for much longer than the iconic memory, which is then referred to as eidetic memory . Whether, or to what extent, this is a photo-like storage of the information in the sensory memory is controversial. The exact use of this term in the specialist literature is not always entirely uniform. A common definition of eidetic memory, according to Gray and Gummerman, is the following:

“The ability to retain an accurate, detailed, visual image of a complex scene or pattern (sometimes colloquially referred to as extended photographic memory), or the ability to (mentally) 'see' an image, which is an exact copy, that only a minority has the original sensory information. "

According to studies, around 5 to 10 percent of toddlers have an eidetic memory to some extent, which they usually lose later. Well-known individual cases to which a photographic or eidetic memory is sometimes ascribed in the literature include Kim Peek , Stephen Wiltshire and Solomon Shereshevsky . However, their classification as "real" eidetics is controversial.

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: eidetic  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Rainer Maderthaner: Psychology . UTB 2007, ISBN 978-3-8252-2772-2 , p. 219 ( excerpt (Google) )
  2. a b David Moxon: Memory . Heinemann 2000, ISBN 978-0-435-80652-1 , p. 15 ( excerpt (Google) )
  3. Eidetic Imagery ( Memento of March 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) - student website at Sarah Lawrence College with a detailed description and extensive bibliography (accessed April 11, 2010)
  4. ^ J. David Sweatt: Mechanism of Memory . Academic Press, 2009, ISBN 9780080959191 , p. 44 ( excerpt (Google) )
  5. Francesca Happé, Uta Frith: Autism and Talent . Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 185, ISBN 9780199560141 ( excerpt (Google) )
  6. ^ Gary Stix: You Must Remember This ... Because You Have No Choice . In: Remember When ?: The Science of Memory . MacMillan, 2013, ISBN 9781466833883 , p. 28 ( excerpt (Google) )