= George Sperling
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<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.<The information available in brief visual presentations by George Sperling>[Introduction,p.1; partial-report experiments3–5]{ref}
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?<The information available in brief visual presentations by George Sperling>[Partial-report experiments and post-exposure instruction conditions; Experiment7,p.16]{ref}
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.
Author-hosted research archive: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~whipl/staff/sperling/sperling.html .
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