George Sperling

George Sperling (born 1934) is an American cognitive psychologist. He is a Distinguished Professor of both Cognitive Science and Neurobiology & Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Sperling documented the existence of iconic memory (one of the sensory memory subtypes). Through several experiments, he showed support for his hypothesis that human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory. He was in the forefront in wanting to help the deaf population in terms of speech recognition. He argued that the telephone was created originally for the hearing impaired but it became popularized by the hearing community. He suggested with a sevenfold reduction in the bandwidth for video transmission, it can be useful for the improvement in American Sign Language communication. Sperling used a method of partial report to measure the time course of visual persistence (sensory memory).

In 1955, Sperling graduated his BS degree at the University of Michigan with hopes to become a scientist in one of the major scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics. In 1956, he went on to receive an MA in psychology from Columbia University. His passion for physiological psychology began accidentally in university and caused him to pursue a career in cognitive psychology. He received his PH.D. from Harvard and has advanced much after in the field of cognitive psychology by many of his famous works and research.

In the summer of 1958, Sperling went to work at Bell Laboratories where numerous experiments were conducted. Sperling was originally attracted to psychology because he wanted to apply quantitative methods and theories used by physicists to describe the brain's mental microprocesses.

In the early 1960s, George Sperling proposed a method of measuring visual persistence duration, an auditory synchronization method of measuring visual persistence duration. This approach had the synchrony of a click and the onset/termination of a light, this synchrony being judged by the subject. Later the method was innovated by with Erich Weichselgartner so that the entire rise and fall of the temporal brightness function was also measured, contrasting the initial method that only measured the moment and which visual persistence stopped.

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