George Sperling

An American psychologist whose classic partial-report experiments became central to the science of visual memory.

• Signature vocabulary: iconic memory, sensory memory, information processing, perception.
• Worldview: Cognition can be understood by studying the fleeting informational stores that bridge sensation and more durable memory.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would analyze the flow and persistence of visual information rather than treating cognition as a single undifferentiated system.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Spare, experimental, and moment-sensitive, focused on the brief availability of information before it fades.

• iconic memory
• sensory persistence
• partial report
• early visual availability
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• sensory memory
• information processing
• perception

• his classic work is narrowly about very brief visual storage, not a general map of memory or personality
• the laboratory conditions that reveal iconic memory do not translate directly into all everyday remembering

• It may have been available for an instant even if you could not hold it.
• A partial cue can reveal what was briefly present in the visual trace.
• Let us distinguish failure to retain from failure to perceive.

• The Information Available in Brief Visual Presentations
• Studies of visual memory
• Information-processing research