This experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that subjects must know the length of the viewing matter they will be scanning before the target is presented in order to scan efficiently. Adult subjects were required to scan visually for a predetermined item. Targets were one, two, or four letters in length and the pairs of slides shown on…

The effects of types of both memorized items and probes (digit, word, and dot pattern), using Sternberg's character-recognition procedure, were studied. Reaction time (RT) was a linear function of the set size of memorized items consistent with a serial search model. Response type (positive or negative) affected the encoding time (intercept of RT…

The extent to which children of two age levels use visual or name codes in recognizing similarities and differences between short words was studied. Subjects were presented with a word for .5, 1.0, or 1.5 seconds, followed immediately by a second word, and were instructed to press a key indicating whether or not the two words had the same name.…

Twenty children in each of grades 2 and 4 were given a reaction time task of the type in which Sternberg (1969) shows high-speed, serial, exhaustive scanning of information in memory. On each trial subjects were asked to memorize two, four, or six pictures and were then presented with a single picture probe. The subject made a key-pressing…