How much information can a person gather from the world at one time? That was the question George Sperling addressed in a study in 1960. At that time, people thought we could gather only a few items at any one moment. This limit was called the span of apprehension, a concept that is no longer used. In his experiment, called the Partial Report, Sperling attempted to discover how sensory storage works by asking participants to recall/report only some of what they saw. He presented his participants a 3 x 3 array of letters like the one below:
X D F
Q P T
N W K
After the letters were removed, a tone would indicate which row was to be recalled. He found that if the delay between the removal of the letters and the tone was very brief, participants did much better than the usual four to six items. Later researchers argued that these results represented a new type of memory that held visual information very briefly. They called this iconic memory (Neisser, 1967).
References:
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychology Monographs, 74, 1-29.
1.2Experiment Setup
1.3Instructions
Instructions
You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of each trial, a fixation mark will appear. Please look at this mark. After it is removed, an array of letters will be presented in three or more rows. Look carefully at these letters, but do not try to read them. The letters will remain on screen only briefly. After they are removed, an arrow will appear pointing to the row you are to recall. Type the letters that you recall from that row and press Enter to proceed to the next trial.
1.4Experiment
Begin Experiment
Start Experiment
1.5Results
Results
1.6Quiz
Quiz
Question
1.1
The independent variable for this experiment is:
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
The independent variable is the value that is changed by the experimenter. In this case, it is the delay between the presentation of the letter array and the presentation of the arrow indicating which row you are to recall, so the correct answer is delay of the arrow.
Question
1.2
The primary dependent variable in this experiment is:
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
The dependent variable is the value the experimenter collects to indicate how you performed in the experiment. In this case, we determined how many letters you typed in the correct position, so the correct answer is percent correct.
Question
1.3
The role of presenting the arrow is to:
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
The arrows are meant to indicate which row of letters you are to recall.
Question
1.4
Which statement best describes the results found in this experiment?
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
The standard finding is that the longer the delay, the fewer letters tend to be recalled.
Question
1.5
The name of the proposed short-term sensory storage that is used to explain these results is called:
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
Ulric Neisser coined the name iconic for this proposed short-term sensory storage in 1967.