George Sperling

Who is George Sperling?

George Sperling 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. 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.