Marvin Minsky argued in his book The Society of Mind that the reported cases of eidetic memory should be considered as "unfounded myth[s]". This view was supported by an experimental study conducted by psychologist Adriaan de Groot. The experiment was intended to investigate chess grandmasters' ability to memorize positions of chess pieces on a chessboard. When those chess experts were provided with arrangements that were inconsistent with a real chess game, their performance was about the same as non-experts. These results indicate that the eidetic ability of those chess grandmasters were not innate, but a learned strategy with certain types of information. Wilding and Valentine searched for people claiming to have an eidetic or otherwise superior memory via public media. Out of the 31 people who called in, only three actually had a significantly above-average but not eidetic memory.
