Sensory Receptors and Sensory Stores

Physical stimuli are received via the sensory receptors (eyes, ears, etc.) and stored for a very brief period of time in sensory stores (sensory memory). Visual information is stored for up to half a second in iconic memory and sounds are stored for slightly longer (up to two seconds) in echoic memory. This enables us to remember a sentence as a sentence, rather than merely as an unconnected string of isolated words, or a film as a film, rather than as a series of still pictures.