Integral and Separable Stimulus Structure in Iconic Memory: A Replication and Extension of Burns (1987)

Abstract

Sperling's partial/whole-report methodology (Sperling, 1960) was employed with dimensions from integral and separable stimuli as selection cues. The redundancy of the stimulus combinations presented was varied in correlated, control, and orthogonal conditions, and selective readout performance was measured. In this way, the effects of the noncued dimension on selective readout of the cued dimension could be characterized for integral and separable stimuli. Results support and extend the findings recently presented by Burns and indicate that stimulus structure (e.g., integral, separable) is an important factor in determining the feature integration or feature segregation of dimensional combinations in selective readout from iconic memory.