Sensory Memory: A Look into Iconic and Echoic Memories, Papers of Psychology

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Sensory Memory

PSY 400, Human Memory, Fall 2003

September 3, 2003

Overview of today’s material

• Housekeeping.
• Weber-Fechner Law Demonstration.
• Memory or perception?
• Iconic Memory: The Partial Report Experiment.
  1. Sperling, 1960.
  2. PSY 400, Fall ’03.
• Echoic memory, the precategorical acoustical store.

Important stuff from last time

• Who was Ebbinghaus?
• Ebbinghaus’ evidence for remote associations.
• Ebbinghaus’ forgetting function
• Weber-Fechner Law

Another Try at the Weber-Fechner

Law

∆S = k

∆P

P

• The actual weight is P.
• The perceived weight is S.
• Can a subject tell the weight of two cups apart?

Taxonomical Approach to Memory

Research

• One of the tendencies in memory research is to “categorize” memory performance.
• This is kind of like the approach to Biology early in the last century.

A Popular Taxonomy of Memory

 


  
  
     

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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 and the time scale.

A graphic illustration

Early Studies of Visual Memory

• Counting small numbers of objects quickly presented
• Averbach, 1963 (Figure 2.1).
• The longer an image is presented, the better we can evaluate it.
• This saturates around 200 ms
• “Span of apprehension” depend on vision + memory + counting ability

Sperling 1960

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

PSY 400 Fall ’03’s results

(28 Ss at 11:20 this morning)

ISI (ms) % Correct 20 60. 100 58. 300 51. 1000 50.

A Graph of our Data

Methodological Concerns

How could our results of the experiment depend on different strategies a participant might use? Put another way, how could a participant “cheat” on the experiment?

• What if we only concentrated on one row? What effect would this have on the curve?
• How could we detect this?
• What if we tended to blink when we were supposed to be looking at the array?

A Reanalysis of Our Data

0 250 500 750 1000 ISI (ms)

0

1

2

3

Number Correct

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