Photographic memory test

What the test measures

Psychologists call this kind of task object-location memory: objects are shown for a set time, then put back in their positions. Remembering where things are takes three jobs: knowing the object, knowing the place, and tying the two together.

How much you can hold at a glance is small. In a classic experiment people could keep only about four colours or orientations in visual memory at once, and a well-known review puts the general limit at about four chunks. So past four pictures, your score depends less on a snapshot of the grid and more on how you store what you see.

Is photographic memory real?

Not in the sense most people mean. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines photographic memory as “exceptionally detailed and highly accurate recollection of information or visual experiences” and adds that it is “widely but mistakenly considered synonymous with an eidetic image”. An eidetic image is the nearest real thing: a vivid picture of a scene that stays for seconds to minutes after it has gone, more common in children than in adults.

Even that is rare. Ralph Haber’s 1979 review found eidetic images “only available to a small percentage of children 6–12 years old” and virtually nonexistent in adults; estimates among children before their teens run from about 2 to 10 percent, and even their images are often far from perfect.

The famous exception was a woman known as Elizabeth, tested with random-dot patterns in 1970. Nobody has come close to her results since, and she apparently declined to be tested again. When John Merritt later printed a similar test in magazines and newspapers, about a million people tried it and 30 sent in the right answer, yet none of the 15 he visited could repeat it while he watched. As Barry Gordon of Johns Hopkins puts it, a true photographic memory “has never been proved to exist”.

Is a photographic memory a sign of a high IQ?

No link has been found. Haber’s review reports that extensive research failed to find any consistent tie between eidetic imagery and intellectual, cognitive, neurological or emotional measures. And the people with the best memories in the world are not using one: top competitors at the World Memory Championships and similar events scored no higher on intellectual tests than others and had no structural brain differences. What set them apart was that they used a spatial learning strategy.

How to remember more pictures

Do what the champions do, on a small scale. As each picture appears, say its place, reading the grid like a page: “key, top row, first; pie, top row, third.” A few named places are easier to keep than a snapshot of the whole grid. The same idea, with a route through a building instead of a grid, is the method of loci, and fifty memory palace ideas will give you places to use it. For numbers instead of pictures, try the number memory test.