Running Head DURATION OF ICON Essays - Mental Processes, Memory

Running head: DURATION OF ICON How Much Information Will an Individual Store in His or Her Iconic Memory? Evelyn Delgado Queens College/ CUNY How much information will an individual store in his or her iconic memory? In a given time, individuals are able to perceive more information than they can verbally encode. This is the process by which a visual stimulus is transformed to neurons to enable the brain to store information in the immediate memory. The rate of transfer is how fast an individual can encode something in a given time, which is stored in the immediate or short-term memory. It is stated that visual input can be stored in some medium, that later will be recalled. When the duration of the stimulus is limited, information is not properly encoded from a stimulus to a verbal code and it is lost from immediate memory. This is a cognitive process. The term "icon" was introduced by Neisser (1967) to refer to the brief persistence of information from a visual display after the "display" is no longer present. Early experimenters, such as Erdman and Dodge (1898), had been concerned with this phenomenon and asked how much information could be acquired at a single fixation reading. The typical finding from briefly presenting a set of letters and having the subjects report as many letters as possible (full-report) was that the perceptual span was 4 to 5 letters. In replicating Sperling's experiment we hope to see why iconic memory as well as duration recall is limited. He has shown that the duration of an icon has to do with the ability of an individual to encode the visual information. One limitation to the study of the icon is, its very brief duration. As individuals begin reporting the contents of the icon, it is already disappearing. Sperling invented the partial-report technique to overcome this difficulty. His third experiment is being replicated to understand the problem at hand. He used manipulations to control the rate at which information is verbally coded as well as the span of apprehension (memory). Consequently increasing the ability of subjects to report more of the information available to them. Sperling's test presented a 3 x 3 matrix of letters, flashed for 50 milli-seconds (msec.). Instead of using the full-report method of previous studies (report as much as you can of the whole display), he used a new partial-report method. In his within subjects study, participants saw the display of letters, and then heard a tone that was high-pitched, medium-pitched or low-pitched. The high-pitched tone indicated to report the top line of the display. The medium tone indicated to report the middle line of the display. The low tone indicated to report the bottom line of the display. According to Sperling's research, individuals were able to report 80% of the letters on a line, if the tone was sounded just before the letters were presented. That drops only slightly, to about 75% when the tone immediately follows the letters. Sperling's experiment showed that the limit in report of letters from a brief visual display was due to a rapid decay of the icon. The longer the icon or stimulus is present the more information one can encode and therefore recall. Limited duration recall is due to the rate of decay of the icon. The longer an individual waits to recall a given stimulus the less he or she can recall. When knowing the duration and the capacity of the visual sensory register one can, to a point, determine if the subject have a better chance of remembering certain in formation of any visual stimulus. Method Participants Sixteen Experimental Psychology students from Queens College participated in the experiment to meet a course requirement. The mean age was 22.61 years with a standard deviation of 2.89. The mean years of education were 15.44 with a standard deviation of 0.98. Material & Apparatus The experiment was conducted with 16 MEL Lab manuals as well as formatted 3.5" disks MEL Lab. The experiments were run in MS-DOS mode; on 16 different IBM compatible computers with Microsoft Windows 95 program that are kept in the Psychology laboratory at Queens College. Experimental Design The independent variable was the delay of instruction tone. The delay occurred in three intervals or levels of