He is a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology in the development of experimental techniques to study human information processing.
[1] He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in mathematical statistics at the University of Cambridge in 1960, and he subsequently worked as a research scientist in the linguistics and artificial intelligence research department at Bell Laboratories, where he continued to work as a member of the technical staff for over twenty years.
This is a method that uses reaction time measures over a range of tasks in order to identify different cognitive processing stages.
[3] In the early 1960s, Sternberg published an original experiment demonstrating the mechanics of cognitive information processing.
The experiment entails memorization of a positive set, a list of items such as numbers or words.