Let's Explore our Memory: Visual Memory.

3 months ago (Edited)

Although words and their meanings are significant, they're not the only things we recall. Our memory also retains aspects of how our senses experience things.

Yep!

Today's Blog-isode is gonna be interesting!

For a better understanding please refer to our previous blog-isodes.

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Now, the idea is not just that we know that, say, people's waists are between their head and their toes .

Of course we do, but that isn't all.

We also appear to be capable of recalling this middle ground from a mental picture that shares some traits with the original visual encounter. As some writers (starting with Shakespeare) have described, we envision it in "our mind's eye."

Similar statements have been said about other senses, like hearing things in our mind's ear (said by composers) or feeling with our mind's fingers (said by blind people), but we'll mainly focus on visual memory in this series.

Now the first attempt to study visual imagery goes way back a hundred years ago when Sir Francis Galton, the founder of the field of individual differences, asked people to describe their own images and to rate them for vividness.

The results showed that individuals differed widely.

Some folks claimed they could easily summon up past scenes and see them very clearly. But others, including some famous painters, said they never experienced mental images at all.

But the thing is, these differences in how people described their own experiences have surprisingly little to do with how they actually performed on various tasks that seemed to call for visual memory.

A study found that how clearly people thought they could imagine things didn't match how well they actually did on a test about remembering spatial designs. Also, there's no connection between how people rate their own mental images and how much they improve their memory using mental tricks.

Because people's own opinions about their mental images weren't very helpful, psychologists started using more advanced methods. Instead of just asking what the image looked like, they asked what it helped the subject to do.

For example, is the image a mental picture from which we can read off information as if it were an actual visual scene outside?

In general, the answer is no. But there are a few exceptions. One of the most notable is eidetic imagery, where people can have vivid and detailed images of scenes that can be examined almost like they're real.

In a study, a bunch of school kids were shown a picture for thirty seconds. Then, after it was removed, they were asked if they could still see anything and, if they could, to explain what it was.

Evidence for eidetic imagery is contained in the following account of a ten-year-old boy who was looking at a blank easel from which a picture from Alice in Wonderland had just been removed.

EXPERIMENTER: Do you see something there?
SUBJECT: I see the tree, a gray tree with three limbs. I see the cat with stripes around its tail.
EXPERIMENTER: Can you count those stripes?
SUBJECT: Yes (pause). There's about 16.
EXPERIMENTER: You're counting what?
SUBJECT: Black, white or both? Both.
EXPERIMENTER: Tell me what else you see.
SUBJECT: And I can see the flowers on the bottom. There's about three stems but you can see two pairs of flowers. One on the right has green leaves, a red flower on the bottom with yellow on top. And I can see the girl with a green dress. She's got blond hair and a red hair band, and there are some leaves in the upper left-hand corner where the tree is.

Eidetic imagery is not very common. Only about 5 percent of schoolchildren tested seem to have it, and it's likely even less common in adults. One author suggests that this gap between children and adults might just mean that kids use mental images more in their thinking, maybe because their ability to remember words and concepts isn't fully developed yet.

Anyway, there's no proof that this type of imagery is particularly helpful for thinking. Despite what many people think, memory experts usually don't have eidetic imagery (also known as photographic memory); their talent lies in arranging information in memory rather than storing it as mental pictures.

The Bus Stops Here for today:

Thank you, friends, for staying with me through these blogisodes. Your thoughts and opinions are always welcome and appreciated. I'd be happy to hear them. We will build on this in tomorrow's blogisode. Until then, stay safe, friends.