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

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Sensory Memory

PSY 373, Human Memory

January 25, 2007

Overview of today’s material

• Taxomonical approach to human memory.
• Memory or perception?
• Iconic Memory: The Partial Report Experiment (incl demo)

Important stuff from last time

• Definition of associative symmetry.
• Evidence for remote associations.
• Forgetting slows down (Power-law forgetting).

Experimental control

• Isolate the variable you’re interested in.
• Average over everything you can’t eliminate.

Types of Memory

1. Short-term memory/long-term memory
2. Episodic/semantic memory
3. Declarative/procedural memory
4. Explicit/implicit memory

The Modal Model

Over the next couple of weeks we will study three memory “stores.”

1. Sensory registers
2. Short-term memory
3. Long-term memory

These stores differ along dimensions of peripheral- ness/central-ness, capacity and the time scale.

Capacity

Time scale

Sensory Memory

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

Where do you draw the line between

memory and perception?

How many frames per second in a movie?

A thought experiment about counting

• Let’s say we can count 1 item per second.
• How long does it take to count N items?
• Let’s say your task is to count beans.
• What should the relationship of RT to beans look like?

Subitizing

• In fact, it doesn’t look like that.
• You are very fast for numbers up to about 5 or so.
• Presumably you recognize the pattern—think of dice, or shapes.
• The “constellation” of beans is perceived and remembered.

Sperling 1960

• Letters are more complex and detailed than dots or beans.
• How much information can be retained?
• How does this information decay?

Sperling’s stimuli

X L K G

H A P Y

E L D W