"Broadbent (1975) noted that the ability to recall items from an array grows with the visual field duration: “for the first fiftieth of a second or so the rate of increase in recall is extremely fast, and after that it becomes slower.” He cites Sperling’s (1967) argument that in the early period, items are read in parallel into some visual store; but that, after it fills up, additional items can be recalled only if some items are read (more slowly) into a different, perhaps articulatory store. Viewed in this way, the visual store would have a capacity of three to five items, given that the performance function rapidly increases for that number of items. However, the “visual store” could be a central capacity limit (assumed here to be the focus of attention) rather than visually specific as the terminology used by Sperling seems to imply."