Open Science Tools / Pavlovia
6 minutes
The Sternberg Task: Serial Exhaustive Memory Scanning
In the Sternberg task a small set of items is memorised and a probe item is judged present or absent. Reaction time increases linearly with set size by roughly 40 milliseconds per item, and the slope is the same for present and absent probes. Sternberg interpreted this as serial and exhaustive scanning of short-term memory, an inference from timing data to the structure of a mental process.