George Sperling (born 1934) is an American cognitive psychologist. He is a Distinguished Professor of both Cognitive Science and Neurobiology & Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Sperling documented the existence of iconic memory (one of the sensory memory subtypes). Through several experiments, he showed support for his hypothesis that human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory.