Iconic memory is the brief memory of sight, stored without much processing. Sensory memory refers to any recollection of the senses. George Sperling introduced the idea in the 1960s, and Ulric Neisser coined the term. Experiments are ongoing to understand how the brain registers visual images.
Iconic memory is the term for when the human brain remembers an image after briefly showing the image. Sensory memory refers to any recollection of any of the senses. Iconic memory refers only to the memory of sight. The word icon means a picture or image, hence the term for this type of short-term memory. From experiments, scientists have learned that a witnessed image is stored briefly without the brain taking much time to process it.
Sensory deposits, also called sensory buffers, save a visual image for a very short time. Echo memory, auditory memory, remembers sounds for less than four seconds, while iconic memory disappears in less than a second. With these memory tests, the human brain doesn’t have much time to decide what to process. Each sense remembers information for a different amount of time. The information transfer from the eye to the brain is preserved long enough for the eye to move on to the next point.
The idea was introduced by George Sperling in the early 1960s. Using a tachistoscope, Sperling showed his test subjects letters arranged to form a box shape, three letters high and four wide. The tachistoscope, invented in 1859 and used to boost memory or reading speed, is a projection device that flashes images on a screen for just a fraction of a second. Sperling recorded how many blocked letters subjects could read during the visual flash. Typically, participants could read three to four letters during the iconic memory test.
Sperling then added sound to the projected images 250 milliseconds after the letters appeared. The sounds were different tones: high, medium and low. Subjects were asked to read lines of high, medium, or low letters depending on the tone they heard. Typically, subjects heard the tone and then read three or four letters from any line. These experiments showed that subjects were seeing a memory of all the letters for a quarter of a second, then reading from that iconic image once they heard the tone.
Later, in 1967, Ulric Neisser coined the phrase iconic memory. He wanted the term to mean the preservation of a duplicate of an image visible to the retina. In the 1990s, the findings of iconic memory were used to conduct further experiments on how the human brain registers visual images. Experiments are underway to find out how quickly people can detect changes in a group of visually presented items.
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