Saul Sternberg

Saul Sternberg investigated the timing of mental processes using controlled reaction time experiments. In a 1966 memory-scanning study, participants judged whether a test symbol belonged to a short memorized set. Mean reaction time increased with set length, motivating an account involving rapid internal comparisons.^[ref]

An illustrative decomposition is $T(n)=a+bn$, where $n$ is the number of stored symbols, $a$ summarizes size-independent time and $b$ summarizes additional time per item. If $a=300\mathrm{ms}$ and $b=35\mathrm{ms}$ per item, increasing $n$ from two to six increases predicted time from $370$ to $510\mathrm{ms}$. These are invented teaching values, not reported estimates.

The methodological insight is to turn a proposed mental process into a pattern of quantitative predictions. A linear trend by itself does not uniquely prove one internal architecture; competing processes and strategies must be compared. This distinction keeps the observed timing effect separate from the explanatory model.

Institutional profile: psychology.sas.upenn.edu/people/saul-sternberg .