George Sperling investigated the amount and duration of information available after a brief visual presentation. His 1960 experiments used partial report paradigms to separate limits on what observers could report from limits on the information initially available.[ref]
The information available in brief visual presentations by George Sperling. Introduction,p.1; partial-report experiments3–5
The key intervention selected only part of a symbol display for report, including conditions with instructions after the display. If the selected subset can be reported better than an exhaustive response would suggest, whole-report performance alone has underestimated accessible information. Delaying the cue then adds a temporal question: what remains available by the time selection is requested?[ref]
The information available in brief visual presentations by George Sperling. Partial-report experiments and post-exposure instruction conditions; Experiment7,p.16
This connects perception, attention and sensory memory while giving them distinct experimental roles. A report is a behavioural output, and its limitations need not map one-to-one onto the observer's original visual experience. Sperling's methodological contribution was to make that ambiguity experimentally tractable rather than settle it by asking only for an introspective description.
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