Sensory Memory: An Overview of Iconic and Echoic Memories, Exams of Psychology

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Sensory Memory

PSY 373, Human Memory

January 25, 2008

Overview of today’s material

• Iconic Memory: Sperling’s Partial Report Procedure
• Echoic Memory: The suffix effect.

Important stuff from last time

• Contiguity effect (and asymmetry).
• Evidence for remote associations.
• Attentional blink

About experiment reports

• When an experiment is assigned, you don’t have to write about it.
• When a report is assigned, you do have to write about it.
• You’ll choose from several we’ve completed.
• First report will be due after the first exam.

A graphic illustration

Sensory Memory

• Sensory memory
  1. Visual sensory memory, “iconic”
  2. Acoustic sensory memory, “echoic,” precategorical acoustic store (PAS)

Sperling’s stimuli

X L K G

H A P Y

E L D W

Whole report vs Partial report

• Briefly flash array of stimuli
• Whole report: tell me all the letters
• Partial report: tell me one row... -... but you don’t know which row until the stimulus is gone.

Sperling’s results

• Whole report estimates “size” of memory at 4. items.
• Subjects reported seeing more than they could say
• Varied delay between offset of array

Some things to think about

• What’s the independent variable?
• What’s the dependent variable?

Another way of looking at things:

Partial better than whole

Sperling’s interpretation

Partial report superior to whole report because it takes time to say the letters. Rapidly-decaying precategorical visual store.

• Precategorical—Letters stored as pattern of light rather than set of letters
• Decaying—Lasts a short time regardless of input
• Visual—shouldn’t depend on info from other modalities

Decay vs interference

Think of a snowman.

Echoic memory

• Like iconic memory, but in the auditory modality.
• Experimental paradigm: Suffix effect
• Theory: Precategorical Acoustic Store (PAS)
• Rely heavily on serial recall