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SENSORY MEMORY

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P262

2025-10-09

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SENSORY MEMORY

A briefly retained record of a stimulus in its raw form. Divided into:

Iconic memory. A short-lived imprint on the mind of an exact visual image– including the image of words encountered in reading. The trace may be retained for about a quarter of a second without being categorised (e.g. matched to letters). An alternative view is that the image is processed for about half a second, enabling perceptual faculties at different levels to determine first location (e.g. letter order) and then identity.

Echoic memory. A short-lived verbatim memory of a piece of speech. Echoic memory may last for at least 2 seconds. It has been suggested that it consists of two phases– a sensory one of about a quarter of a second and a longer one with the information categorised phonetically, which lasts another 3–4 seconds. Echoic memory appears to last rather longer than iconic. Recall of the last digit in a list is significantly better when the list is presented in spoken form than when it is presented in written– suggesting that we do indeed retain a brief ‘echo’ of what has just been said.

See also: Verbatim recall, Working memory

Further reading: Kellogg (1995: Chap. 2)