AGE AND EIDETIC IMAGERY
All of the research over the years has
shown a definite correlation between eidetic imagery and age. EI tends to
appear in children much more frequently than in adults and many recent
researchers have been trying to understand this supposedly negative
correlation. However, the experiments they have been conducting have
not supported the assumption that only children can be eidetikers. For
example, Leask et al. did a long term study on twelve eidetic
children and found that eleven of them were still just as eidetic as
they had been at the beginning of the study. Also, there seems to be
no more of a concentration of eidetikers in younger children than in
older children.
One theory to explain this discrepency
is that
children are much more visual creatures and this preference makes it
easier for them to use their eidetic abilities. Adults, however, are
more reliant on verbal encoding, and this, as was discussed before,
interrupts the eidetic process. Unfortuneately, this theory has not
been well tested, and so it is still unclear as to why the correlation
between age and eidetic imagery exists.