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...