Question

In George Sperling’s experiments, what did immediate partial report tell us about

the contents of visual sensory memory? What did delayed partial report tell

us about the contents of visual sensory memory?

Answer 1

Geoge SperlingsExperiment : Through several experiments he showed support for his hypothesis that human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory. & put forward the existtence of ionic ie sensory memory subtypes.

The partial report : In this condition the participant is required to identify the subset of the characters from avisual display using cued recall, the cued was toned which sounded at vatious intervals of 50 ms . thus the frquency ofthe tone showed the set of characters in the display, which were reported , this kind of sampling gave the immediate results after stimilus offset .As the participant could recall most of the letters ie 9/12 & the row suggested 75% of the entire visual display which was accessible to memory. This increase is the hypothesied capacity of iconic memory derived from full trials reports

Itstill showed all the letters, then gave a high pitched/ medium pitch/ and low pitch to let person know what row they had to focus on. the results were that 82% of reports were accurate, ppl actually have a lot of access to this information, they just focus differently.

The contents of visual sensory memory: Itconsists of three stores: Sensory Memory (SM), whose visual component is called iconic memory, Short-Term Memory (STM; is called working memory, WM), and Long-Term Memory (LTM).

The external input is first stored in a large capacity called sensory memory called (SM) , then A subset of the contents of SM is transferred into a more durable few in seconds in severely capacity-limited store, called Short-Term Memory (STM).Finally, the contents of STM are transferred to Long-Term Memory (LTM), also called Long-Term Store, the store with a long duration & very large capacity.

Delayed partial report :Partial report is an experimental methodology developed by George Sperling (1960) in the late 1950's. ... Partial report takes a different attack. Instead of a string, an array of letters (3 x 3 or 4 x 4 are common) and after the letters are presented, a signal is given to indicate which row the person is to recall

It simply delayed the tone by 1 second and the results were that no matter what row you asked them to focus on the couldn't give a full report.