Running head: DURATION OF ICON
            
            
            
             How Much Information Will an Individual Store in His or Her Iconic Memory?
            
             Evelyn Delgado
            
             Queens College/ CUNY
            
             How much information will an individual store in his or her iconic memory? In a given time, individuals are able to perceive more information than they can verbally encode. This is the process by which a visual stimulus is transformed to neurons to enable the brain to store information in the immediate memory. The rate of transfer is how fast an individual can encode something in a given time, which is stored in the immediate or short-term memory. It is stated that visual input can be stored in some medium, that later will be recalled. When the duration of the stimulus is limited, information is not properly encoded from a stimulus to a verbal code and it is lost from immediate memory. This is a cognitive process. The term "icon" was introduced by Neisser (1967) to refer to the brief persistence of information from a visual display after the "display" is no longer present. Early experimenters, such as Erdman and Dodge (1898), had been concerned with this phenomenon and asked how much information could be acquired at a single fixation reading. The typical finding from briefly presenting a set of letters and having the subjects report as many letters as possible (full-report) was that the perceptual span was 4 to 5 letters. In replicating Sperling's experiment we hope to see why iconic memory as well as duration recall is limited. He has shown that the duration of an icon has to do with the ability of an individual to encode the visual information. One limitation to the study of the icon is, its very brief duration. As individuals begin reporting the contents of the icon, it is already disappearing. Sperling invented the partial-report technique to overcome this difficulty. His third experiment is being replicated to und...