Abstract: Iconic memory or short-term visual storage (STVS), has been widelystudied in temporal aspects. Here, using the partial report (PR) paradigmsdeveloped by G. Sperling, experiments on two groups are carried outto study some of the spatial characteristics of STVS, which have beenneglected so far, yet they are important. In Exp.1, the effects of information content on PR performance arestudied. It seems that the range of visual information in space produceslittle effect on PR performance while the density of information affectsPR performance a lot. Two explanations are offered, one is connectedwith the time consumed in information extraction and the other with thenatural limitation of the visual system in providing visual information. Exp.2 is devised to study the referential frame that has long beenregarded as an important factor in visual perception. Of the two kinds offrames, that is, the retinal frame and the spatial frame, the retinal oneappears to be elementary for STVS in the present study while the mecha-nism of the spatial one is activated only in special cases although it ismore efficient in PR performance. An explanation is given from the evo-lutionary angle.

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