George Sperling's 1960 experiments tested how much visual information people retain immediately after a brief glimpse of a display. Earlier whole-report methods, in which a participant tries to name every item seen, had suggested a very limited visual memory capacity; Sperling's partial-report technique, cueing recall of just one row of a grid immediately after it disappeared, tested whether that limit reflected storage capacity or the time it takes to report what was seen.
Facts
Key FindingCued immediately after a briefly flashed three-by-three letter grid disappeared, participants could report a given row correctly about seventy-five percent of the time, implying about seventy-five percent of the whole display was momentarily available to memory, far more than the three to five letters, about a third, they could report when asked to recall the entire grid at once; the difference showed a large-capacity visual memory that decays within a fraction of a second, not a small storage limit. 1 Method
Participants Connections
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Iconic Memory
Wikimedia FoundationPartial report procedureQuote, Partial report procedure
The cue was a tone which sounded at various time intervals (~50 ms) following the offset of the stimulus.
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