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Visual memory
 
 
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Visual memory is a part of memory
Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's mental ability to store, retain and recall information. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of mnemonic....
 preserving some characteristics of our senses pertaining to visual experience
Visual perception

Visual perception is the ability to interpret information from visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight or vision....
. We are able to place in memory information that resembles objects, places, animals or people in sort of a mental image. Some authors refer to this experience as an “our mind's eye” through which we can retrieve from our memory a mental image of the original object, place, animal or person.

The first scientist to give serious consideration to visual imagery was Sir Francis Galton
Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton Fellow of the Royal Society , Cousin#Half_cousins of Charles Darwin, was an England Victorian era polymath, anthropologist, Eugenics, tropical List of explorers, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, Psychometrics, and statistician....
  (1822-1911) in the field of individual differences.






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Visual memory is a part of memory
Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's mental ability to store, retain and recall information. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of mnemonic....
 preserving some characteristics of our senses pertaining to visual experience
Visual perception

Visual perception is the ability to interpret information from visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight or vision....
. We are able to place in memory information that resembles objects, places, animals or people in sort of a mental image. Some authors refer to this experience as an “our mind's eye” through which we can retrieve from our memory a mental image of the original object, place, animal or person.

The first scientist to give serious consideration to visual imagery was Sir Francis Galton
Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton Fellow of the Royal Society , Cousin#Half_cousins of Charles Darwin, was an England Victorian era polymath, anthropologist, Eugenics, tropical List of explorers, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, Psychometrics, and statistician....
  (1822-1911) in the field of individual differences. In his research Galton asked his subjects to describe and rate their visual images on vividness. He was able to demonstrate a wide range of clarity, ranging from vivid mental images to none among his test subjects (Galton, 1883).

Since this way of judging mental image has very little scientific objectivity, psychologist
Psychologist

"Psychologist" is an academic, occupational or professional title describing individuals who are either: * social scientists conducting research and/or teaching psychology in a college or university;...
s devised more objective ways of evaluating mental images, based on how much information can be retrieved from them. Overall, there are not conclusive data that would support any benefits from visual mnemonics (Baddeley, 1976).

Eidetic imagery


Eidetic imagery
Eidetic memory

Eidetic memory, photographic memory, or total recall is the ability to memory s, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme accuracy and in abundant volume....
 is perhaps the only kind that produces actual visual memory that can be looked at similarly as if looking at the actual picture. Lake, Haber and Haber produced a study in which they presented a subject with an image for 30 seconds. After removing the image the subjects were asked whether they could see anything. In a study of elementary school children they presented them with an illustration of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a novel written by England author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a Rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures....
. After removing it some children were describing with a vivid accuracy the image they have seen. (Haber, 1969)

Eidetic imagery seems to have more effect on children since the adult subjects did not describe similar experience. Koslyn assigns this difference to the lack of verbal and conceptual systems in children, when comparing to adult (Koslyn, 1980, 1984).

There are two kinds of memory related to eidetic imagery: photographic memory and iconic memory.

Photographic memory

There is also no supportive evidence for photographic memory. This phenomenon is usually displayed by some individuals' exceptional skills in mental organization.

Iconic memory

See Iconic memory
Iconic memory

Iconic memory is a type of short term memory visual memory , named by George Sperling in 1960. Experiments performed by Sperling and colleagues provided evidence for a rapidly decaying sensory trace, lasting only approximately 250 ms after the offset of a display....
.

Spatial memory

Spatial memory can be considered a subcategory of visual memory because it relies on a cognitive map
Cognitive map

Cognitive maps, mental maps, mind maps, cognitive models, or mental models are a type of cognition composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual can acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment....


External links

  • is a fascinating website focusing on the physiological aspect of spatial memory.


Sources

  • This page was originally created for , a service to the education community by the in the , , .