Rehearsal of temporal visual information.

This study compared the short-term retention characteristics of temporal information when subjects experienced time under either subject-defined or experimenter-defined rehearsal. Subjects were presented visual durations of 1 and 4 sec. and then required to reproduce these durations following a 15-sec. retention interval. To help maintain the durations in memory, subjects were asked to use either a conscious cognitive strategy or a mental counting strategy. It was predicted that experimenter-defined rehearsal would show less forgetting, as measured by variable error, but this prediction was not supported. There also was no evidence of any response bias or context effects in the temporal reproductions. These results were compared with two previous studies that utilized similar cognitive strategies.