Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Question about memory

I recently heard about a test/study in which subjects were unexpectedly asked at the end of an hour what they remembered about some text they'd seen, but not necessarily read, at the beginning.

Question: what were the test designers likely looking for? What would the implication be of someone being able/not able to answer such questions? I wondered whether it might be testing whether someone had a "true" photographic memory. Any advance? Even, is it better to be able or unable to answer such questions? I for one have a highly efficient "looking for typos the spellchecker can't catch" mode in which I don't think I take in the global meaning of the text, and in these circumstances I would rather hope anything I had accidentally taken in would have gone by an hour later! Does that make me weird?