Chapter 1. Partial Report
1.1 Introduction
Partial Report
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.
1.2 Experiment Setup
1.3 Instructions
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.
1.4 Experiment
Begin Experiment
1.5 Results
Results
1.6 Quiz
Quiz