The Early Work of Paul Fraisse: Immediate Memory, Rhythmical Grouping, and the ‘Psychological Present’

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses two of the earliest works of Paul Fraisse, from 1937 and 1944, on the subject of ‘immediate memory’. Adults or children reproduced the number of sounds presented, with the number and the spacing between them varying. Performance deteriorated markedly in both types of participants as number and spacing increased, although children performed more poorly. Another experiment used temporal grouping and found that this increased the number of items reproduced correctly overall, although performance declined as the number and length of groups increased, for both children and adults. A persistent finding was that for most spacings between five and seven items could be correctly reproduced. This research informed Fraisse’s conception of the ‘psychological present’, which he regarded as a quantity which was flexible (within limits), depending on the material it contained and the way that this material was organised, rather than having fixed duration or content. The research also anticipated later ideas about the limits of information processing, as well as more recent work on the effect of temporal grouping on memory.