Whole Report “report” (remember and write down) as many letters from a brief display as possible Average in laboratory is 4.5 out of nine Class average 2.something

New version of procedure Altered procedure: write one row of letters only—not all of the letters “cued” report by saying “top,” “middle,” or “bottom” Actual letters to remember “L” “T” “W” With whole report, class average was 2.1 / 9 (~23%)

Performance on new task New class average with new procedure was 2 letters (=2/3 or 67%) Huge improvement in performance With cue, we seem to “focus on” some of the letters and ignore others; focusing in our image of the display (a memory of the display)

Rapidly fading memory of the display A mental picture (an image) of the display of letters is created at first But, the image only lasts a very short period of time Image lasts long enough to report one row of letters (about 3 letters), but not long enough to report all of the letters (9 letters)

Sensory memory It’s the rapidly fading image (or memory) of the display “sensory” = tied to your senses With vision, it’s called visual sensory memory (aka, the “icon”) Difference in performance between the original procedure and the modified procedure (“partial” report) reveals the existence of sensory memory

Other sensory memories One for hearing: audition  auditory sensory memory (the “echo”) Auditory sensory memory only lasts up to 2 seconds All sensory memories last for a few seconds or less

Establishing existence of sensory memory When partial report performance is better than whole report performance, then that indicates the presence of sensory memory In class demo, partial report (67%) was higher than whole report (23%), showing the existence of visual sensory memory

Sperling (1960) experiments He established the existence of visual sensory memory Last graph shows that visual sensory memory lasts for only about ½ second The icon is an example of a mental structure

Attention and the report task T L W A J Q F P O Displayed these letters briefly, then cued report to report one row only The cue allows you to select one row and ignore others (i.e., selective attention)

Kinds of attention Selective attention (as in partial report task): focus on one thing and ignore another Divided attention: trying to pay attention to more than one thing at a time (i.e., multitasking)

Divided Attention Serial versus parallel processing E.g., two example tasks: taking notes and mentally planning dinners for each night of coming week One possibility: people have no problem doing these two things simultaneously Means that two separate series of processing steps occurring at the same time (called “parallel” processing)

More on divided attention If people cannot do the tasks simultaneously, then not parallel processing One possibility is serial processing (serial means working on only one thing at a time)

Potential Causes of serial processing Physical: only have two eyes, only physically look at one thing at a time, only have two hands, etc. Mental: “interference” between mental processes, structures, or representations

Mechanisms of interference Capacity theory vs. bottleneck theory Capacity theory = mind contains a limited amount of mental resources (kind of like mental fuel) Bottleneck theory = bottleneck in information processing where only some information can get through