Chapter 1. Sternberg Search

1.1 Introduction

You are remembering a very short list of items that you can hold in your memory at one time. Perhaps it is a short list of gifts to buy for a friend. You then see something in a store and you need to determine if this item is on your list. You don’t have it written down, so you search your short-term or working memory. The present experiment was designed by Saul Sternberg (1966) to determine how we search through our short-term or working memory.

Reference:

Sternberg, S. (1966). High-speed scanning in human memory. Science, 153(3736),652-654.

1.2 Experiment Setup

1.3 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, there will be a blank screen for one second. Then a short list of numbers will be presented for you to remember. The list will be 1, 3, or 5 items in length. The longer the list, the longer you will have to memorize it. After the items are removed, there will be a blank screen for two seconds and then a probe item will be presented. Your job is to indicate if the probe was in the list you had to remember. You will be given answer feedback. Please be as accurate as you can while responding quickly to the probe. Use the keys shown below or the buttons on the screen for your responses.

1.4 Experiment

1.5 Results

1.6 Quiz