George Sperling Conducted Classic Experiments in Which Participants Were First

Essay

George Sperling conducted classic 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 s.Might sensory memory also code other physical stimulus characteristics,such as color or size Might it code the categorical identical 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 spatial location information Use your imagination and describe two original experiments modeled on Sperling's studies that might answer such questions.Be sure to state your hypotheses and to identify the pattern of results that would support your hypotheses