Iconic Memory Based on Sperlings Visual Information Processing Model - Literature Review
Iconic Memory Based on Sperling’s Visual Information Processing Model Literature Review
Sperling (1960) based his research on how much information individuals can see in a brief visual display of letters. He established that visual information is held in a temporary sensory store, which he called the visual information store (VIS). He proposed that in the VIS, individuals store the entire stimulus, which decays rapidly (Sperling, 1960). Neisser (1967, as cited in Gegenfurtner & Sperling, 1993) called the VIS “iconic memory” and said that initially all items are held in iconic memory and, at the time of the probe, the items of interest are transferred into a longer lasting storage (working memory).
Sperling (1960) designed three tests to investigate iconic memory: the whole report, the partial position report and the partial category report. Each task involved participants recalling certain alphanumeric symbols from matrices. In the whole report, participants could only recall an average maximum of 4.5 letters as they could not attend to all of the symbols before the contents of the store decayed (Gegenfurtner & Sperling, 1993). On the other hand, in the partial position report, participants could more easily attend to specific rows of the matrices, recalling approximately 75% of the letters in any row before the VIS decayed (Gegenfurtner & Sperling, 1993). The same superiority found in the partial position report was not evident in the partial category report (Sperling, 1960). This suggested that the contents of the icon are not actually recognised in the VIS, and that they are just a raw visual image (Chow & Murdock, 1976).
