Capacity and duration of iconic memory from partial reporting of brief stimuli: A replication of Sperling’s experiment (1960)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been widely accepted that iconic memory has a capacity of minimally 9 elements and a duration of approximately 0.3 seconds. However, Sperling’s (1960) partial report methodology influenced the study of iconic memory by demonstrating its larger capacity than previously considered. Due to the limited number of participants in the original study, a replication study was necessary to corroborate the results of Sperling (1960) to validate the scientific merit of results, thereby strengthening the validity of the study. The present study aimed to replicate Sperling’s (1960) partial report experiment with modern technology amongst a larger and demographically heterogeneous sample. Male and female participants (n = 64) aged 18-59 years old (M = 30.61, SD = 13.211) were recruited to complete four online tasks via Qualtrics. Tasks 1 and 4 involved the recall of briefly presented sequences of 3, 4, 5, and 6 letters. Tasks 2 and 3 required participants to recall an array of 3 and 4 letters and numbers presented in 2 and 3 rows respectively. In Tasks 2 and 3, an auditory cue was presented for 0.05 s at two (high and low) and three different frequencies (high, medium, low), respectively, which indicated the row to be reported at different interstimulus intervals (-0.10, 0.0, 0.15, 0.30, 0.50, 1.0 s) relative to the presented stimuli. Analyses revealed that the interaction between the number of letters and the interstimulus interval, the number of rows and the interstimulus interval, as well as the number of letters and number of rows was statistically significant. The findings of this replication study support the results of Sperling (1960) suggesting that partial report accuracy is influenced by the number of briefly presented characters. Future studies should explore the influence of a controlled environment to explain the effects of the variables on recall abilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".