Sensory Memory: Iconic and Echoic Memories, Study notes of Psychology

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Sensory Memory

PSY 373, Human Memory

September 8, 2008

Overview of today’s material

• Iconic memory
• Echoic memory (modality effect, suffix effect)

Important stuff from last time

• Ebbinghaus’ associations: Asymmetry, non- adjacent associations
• Sensory registers vis a vis the modal model
• Partial report experiment

A graphic illustration

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

Procedure and Coglab demo

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

Sperling’s results: Rapid decay

Another way of looking at things:

Partial better than whole

Questions about Sperling’s

interpretation

• Precategorical? Report letters rather than digits.
• Decaying? Perhaps output interference?
• Visual? Phonological errors in output.

Echoic memory

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

A Serial Recall Example

Present Recall

1. absence
2. hollow
3. pupil
4. river
5. darling
6. campaign
7. helmet
   1. absence
   2. hollow
   3. —
   4. pupil
   5. —
   6. darling
   7. helmet

The Serial Position Curve in Serial

Recall

• Probability of recall as a function of list order.
• Primacy effect: advantage for the first items over items in the middle.
• Recency effect: advantage for the last items over items in the middle.