On the nature of the span of apprehension

Typically, people can only report about four or five items from a briefly presented array of alphanumeric items. A new span task was used to explore the basis of this limitation. In Experiment l, performance suffered when very brief display durations were combined with a verbal-load task, but no significant effects of display duration were found when there was no verbal load. In Experiment 2, a similar interaction was observed between verbal …