Eidetics

Abstract

The term eidetics denotes the domain of eidetic imagery and its study. The standard phenomenon of eidetic imagery consists in seeing a stimulus that is no longer present, when the experimenter is allowed to infer from subjects’ reports or experimental protocols that “seeing” is different from remembering or experiencing an after-image. After a prolonged period from mid-1930 to about 1960 in which the interest in this phenomenon had died out, research was resumed on the grounds of findings which seemed to point at the ability of extracting information from no longer present stimuli, which showed to be different from sensory and recognition memory. The functional role of eidetic imagery in connection to cognitive processes seems still elusive.