= Partial report paradigm
A <partial report paradigm> asks an observer to report a selected subset of presented material. It can estimate available information while reducing the burden of reporting everything. A selection cue before presentation and a cue after presentation test different possibilities: the former can guide initial <attention>, whereas the latter selects from information that remains available after the display.
<George Sperling> used brief visual arrays and post-exposure instructions to separate available visual information from whole-report limits. Tone cues could specify a row or reporting order after the symbols disappeared.<The information available in brief visual presentations by George Sperling>[Introduction,p.1; partial-report experiments3–5; Experiment7,p.16, tone instructions and controls]{ref}
In an invented three-row display with four symbols per row, suppose the cued row is selected uniformly and an observer correctly reports an average of three symbols from it. Under equal-sampling and accessibility assumptions, the inferred available count across the display is $3\times3=9$ of the twelve symbols. This is a sampling argument, not an observation of nine simultaneous verbal responses, and the numbers are not Sperling's measured data.
Delaying the selection cue probes changes in availability over time. A declining partial-report advantage can indicate loss of accessible information, but selection, retrieval and output demands must also be considered. The <partial report paradigm> therefore links <perception> and <sensory memory> to experimentally specified responses without equating every report failure with a failure to see.
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