Question: the storage device of sensory memory is called the

title: Sensory memory
text: Iconic memory . The mental representation of the visual stimuli are referred to as icons ( fleeting images . ) Iconic memory was the first sensory store to be investigated with experiments dating back as far as 1740 . One of the earliest investigations into this phenomenon was by Ján Andrej Segner , a German physicist and mathematician . In his experiment , Segner attached a glowing coal to a cart wheel and rotated the wheel at increasing speed until an unbroken circle of light was perceived by the observer . He calculated that the glowing coal needed to make a complete circle in under 100ms to achieve this effect , which he determined was the duration of this visual memory store . In 1960 , George Sperling conducted a study where participants were shown a set of letters for a brief amount of time and were asked to recall the letters they were shown afterwards . Participants were less likely to recall more letters when asked about the whole group of letters , but recalled more when asked about specific subgroups of the whole . These findings suggest that iconic memory in humans has a large capacity , but decays very rapidly . In a 2001 experiment , Vogel et al. presented a display of between 3 and 12 objects . After 900ms , a second display was presented that was either the same or had one object changed . The result was that the participants ability to decide if the two displays were identical was almost perfect with four objects , but steadily declined as the number of items in the display increased above four . This determined the capacity to be around four items . Another study set out to test the idea that visual sensory memory consists of coarse - grained and fine - grained memory traces using a mathematical model to quantify each . The study suggested that the dual - trace model of visual memory out performed single - trace models .