George Sperling Conducted Experiments in Which Participants Were First Exposed

Essay

George Sperling conducted experiments in which participants were first exposed briefly to a letter matrix; after a varying interval, an auditory tone cued participants to report the letters contained in a specific row of the matrix. The results indicated that iconic memory accurately codes the spatial location of stimuli and that the information in iconic memory decays after approximately 1 second. Might sensory memory also code other physical stimulus characteristics, such as color or size? Might it code the categorical identity of stimuli, such as whether the stimuli are letters or numbers, upper- or lower-case letters, consonants or vowels, and so on? Does such information decay more rapidly or more slowly from sensory memory than does spatial location information? Describe an original experiment modeled on Sperling's studies that might answer one of these questions. State your hypothesis and identify the pattern of results that might occur.