George Sperling

George Sperling (born 1934) 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.

He is a Distinguished Professor of both Cognitive Science and Neurobiology & Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

Education In 1955, George Sperling graduated with a B.S. 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 M.A. degree in psychology from Columbia University.

Career In summer 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. He believed that all nine letters were stored in the viewer's memory for a short period of time, but the memory failed leading to only 4 or 5 being recalled. Sperling called this iconic memory. This was exemplified through Sperling's Iconic Memory Test, which involves having a grid of letters being flashed for 1/20 of a second. If individuals were prompted to recall a particular row immediately after the grid was shown, opposed to being asked to recall the entire grid, participants experienced higher accuracy. This procedure demonstrated that although iconic memory can store the whole grid, information tends to fade away too rapidly for a person to recall all of the information.

Publications Sperling's first publication, "Negative Afterimages Without Prior Positive Images," was in visual psychophysics. He then went on to publish mathematical models for adaptation and flicker, contrast detection, binocular vision, and motion perception.

Select representative publications

1968 Sperling, G., & Sondhi, M. M. (1968). Model for visual luminance discrimination and flicker detection. Journal of the Optical Society of America, 58, 1133–1145. 1984 van Santen, J. P. H., & Sperling, G. (1984). Temporal covariance model of human motion perception. Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science, 1, 451–473. 1985 van Santen, J. P. H., & Sperling, G. (1985). Elaborated Reichardt detectors. Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science, 2, 300–321.