The traditional view of iconic memory as a precategorical, high-capacity, quickly decaying visible memory has recently come under attack (e.g., Coltheart, 1980). Specifically, distinctions have been drawn between visible persistence, or the phenomenal trace of an extinguished stimulus, and informational persistence, knowledge about the visual properties of the stimulus. In the present research we tested two alternative conceptions of informational persistence. One conception is that visual information persists in a visual memory that begins at stimulus offset and lasts for 150-300 ms, independently of exposure duration. The second is that informational persistence arises from a nonvisual memory that contains spatial coordinates for displayed items along with identity codes for those items. Three experiments were conducted in which 3X3 letter arrays were presented for durations ranging from 50 to 500 ms. A single character mask presented at varying intervals after array offset cued report of an entire row of the array. Comparison of the cued row's masked and unmasked letters revealed that spatially-specific visual (i.e., maskable) information persisted after stimulus offset, regardless of exposure duration. This result favors the visual conception of informational persistence. But there was also support for the nonvisual conception: Accuracy increased and item intrusion errors decreased as stimulus duration increased. The implications of these results for models of informational persistence and for transsaccadic integration during reading are discussed.It has been known at least since Aristotle's time (384-322 B.C.) that visual sensation persists after stimulus offset (Allen, 1926). Contemporary interest in this property of the visual system was revived by Sperling (1960). In Sperling's experiments, subjects were presented an array of letters for some brief time.Following stimulus offset, a subset of the information in the array was cued for report. Sperling found that subjects' recall performance for the cued information was very high if the cue was presented within about 100 ms or so of stimulus offset. Furthermore, recall accuracy decreased as the time between stimulus offset and presentation of the recall cue increased. These results contrasted with performance when subjects were asked to report the entire array of letters. In this case, recall performance was limited to only a few items from the array. Taken together, Experiments I and 2 were part of a senior honors thesis submitted by the second author, under the direction of the first author, to Cornell University. Experiment 2 was presented at the 25th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, San Antonio, lexas, November 1984. Experiment 3 and the preparation of the manuscript were supported by an AllUruversity Research Initiation Grant from Michigan State University to the first author, and also by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 85-19580 to the first author.We thank Kathryn Bock, Joseph Brown, Thomas Carr, Lester Hyman, James Zacks, and Rose Zac...