What is iconic memory?
iconic memory is a term when the human brain remembers a picture after a brief view of the visual. Sensory memory refers to any memory of one of the senses. The iconic memory applies only to the memory of the sight. The Word icon means a picture or image, a term for this short -term memory type. From iconic memory experiments, scientists learned that the witness image was briefly stored without spending much time to process the brain.
Sensory trades, also called sensory buffers, save the visual image on very short -term. Echoic memory, auditory memory, remembers sounds in less than four seconds, while iconic memory is gone in less than a second. With iconic memory tests, the human brain does not have much time to decide what to process. Every sense remembers information for a different time. The transfer of information from the eye to the brain is maintained long enough to move the eye to the next point.
The idea of an iconic memory introduced George Sperling tothe beginning of the sixties. Using a tachistoscope, the sperling showed its test items arranged to create a box shape, three letters high and four letters across. A tachistoscope invented in 1859 and is used to increase memory or reading speed, is a projector device that flashes on the screen only in a fraction of a second. Sperling noted how many blocked letters could read during a visual flash. In general, three or four letters could be read during the memory iconic test.
Sperling then added a sound to the projected images of 250 milliseconds after the letters appeared. The sounds were different tones: high, medium and low. Subjects were instructed to read a number of high, medium or low letters depending on which tone they heard. Usually the subjects heard the tone and then read three or four letters from any line. These experiments showed up to the memory of all letters for one quarter of a second and after lesseIsely tone.
Later, in 1967, Ulric Neisser created a phrase iconic memory . He wanted this term to indicate the preservation of a duplicate of the image that is evident for the retina. At the age of 90, the findings from iconic memory were used to carry out other experiments on how the human brain registers visual images. Experiments are underway to see how quickly people can detect changes in a group of visually presented subjects.