10,000 images

Here is a re-post from Andrew Webster on the ExperiencePoint blog, about an experiment in the power of images to stick in memory.

clipped from blog.experiencepoint.com Visuals for Learning There are countless advantages to leveraging visuals to enhance learning. I’ll focus on recall. Check out this discussion about recall percentages with/without visuals. There’s reference here to Lionel Standing’s 10,000 pictures study. The long and short is this: Individuals are shown 10,000 pics in five days (yes, that does sound insane) After seeing all 10k pics, subjects are shown some of these again, but all mixed up with other pics they haven’t seen Subjects are able to recognize which were ones they were already shown with 83% (!) accuracy The more vivid the image, the more likely a subject was to recall it Standing extrapolates that if you see 1M vivid images, then you would remember 98% of them in the near term, and 73% in the long term Here's the abstract for Lionel Standing's journal article "Learning 10,000 Pictures" published in 1973 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.