EXPERIMENTS FOR EIDETIC IMAGERY
Since 1964, nearly all of the experiments on
eidetic imagery have followed the same procedure. It was established by
Haber and Haber and is usually performed on large groups of elementary school
children. The experiment begins with placing a brightly colored square
patch on an easel or other neutral surface. The subject stares at this
square for ten seconds and then the square is taken away. The
experimenter then asks the subject questions about what they see on the
easel now that the square is gone to
determine afterimages and to familiarize the subject with the procedure.
Once this has been done with all four
squares, the experimenter moves on to detailed pictures. The instructions
for this stage are slightly different. The subject is given thirty
seconds to look at the picture and is told to move his or
her eyes around in order to study all of the details of the picture. Once
the picture is taken away, the subject is encouraged to continue moving
their eyes around as they describe what they see. This process is repeated
for four different pictures and can take anywhere from five to thirty
minutes. While there are variations on this procedure, this is the basic
outline of how to test for eidetic imagery.