ABSTRACT
Academic research suggests that human memory for pictures is almost limitless. At the same time repeated national surveys of recall of television commercials suggests a limit to how much advertising people can remember. The academic research is typified by that of Roger Shepard, who had his subjects view 612 different pictures at their own pace, averaging six seconds per picture. Shortly thereafter they were shown 68 pairs of pictures, each pair consisting of one from the original series and one new picture. The pictures from the original series were identified with 98.5 percent accuracy. In another test with a one-week delay, accuracy was 90 percent. 1 Since then, similar studies using 2,500 and 10,000 pictures showed similar results.
