ABSTRACT
This chapter's main focus is the very first half second or so after a visual stimulus is presented to a subject. There is some sort of visual persistence beyond the duration of the physically present stimulus. Neisser (1967) was the first to apply the term icon or iconic memory to visual persistence. His initial description of the icon as a transient visual memory is as follows:
… visual input can be briefly stored in some medium which is subject to very rapid decay. Before it has decayed, information can be read from this medium just as if the stimulus were still active. We can be equally certain that this storage is in some sense a “visual image.” (pp. 18–19)
