Motion information in iconic memory

Motion perception was investigated in two experiments using Sperling's partial report procedure. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with 8 moving squares; at array offset an arrow cued subjects to locate all squares moving in the direction of the arrow. The partial report was found to be superior to the whole report and this was taken as evidence for the existence, in iconic memory, of information about the direction of motion. The second experiment revealed only a minor decay in this superiority with the indicator delayed up to 1 sec. The importance of optical transformations in vision was stressed and it was argued that information processing models need pay greater attention to them.