Recent studies show that recognition memory for sounds is inferior to memory for pictures. Four experiments were conducted to examine the nature of auditory and visual memory. Experiments 1-3 were conducted to evaluate the role of experience in auditory and visual memory. Participants received a study phase with pictures/sounds, followed by a recognition memory test. Participants then completed auditory training with each of the sounds, followed by a second memory test. Despite auditory training in Experiments 1 and 2, visual memory was superior to auditory memory. In Experiment 3, we found that it is possible to improve auditory memory, but only after 3 days of specific auditory training and 3 days of visual memory decay. We examined the time course of information loss in auditory and visual memory in Experiment 4 and found a trade-off between visual and auditory recognition memory: Visual memory appears to have a larger capacity, while auditory memory is more enduring. Our results indicate that visual and auditory memory are inherently different memory systems and that differences in visual and auditory recognition memory performance may be due to the different amounts of experience with visual and auditory information, as well as structurally different neural circuitry specialized for information retention.

Recent studies show that recognition memory for pictures is consistently better than recognition memory for sounds. The purpose of this experiment was to compare the fidelity of auditory and visual memory to better understand the reported differences in the two memory systems. Participants received a study phase with pictures/sounds, followed by a same-day memory test or a delayed recognition memory test. During the memory test, participants were presented with pictures/sounds that were old (presented during study), novel foils not presented during study, or exemplar foils that were variants of objects presented during study. Participants were instructed to classify each picture/sound as Bold^or Bnew^by pressing a corresponding key. The same-day memory task revealed fundamental differences in visual and auditory memory: auditory representations are coarse and gistbased, while visual representations are highly detailed. However, auditory and visual memory performance was similar after a delay of 2 and 7 days and both types of memory representations were more coarse and gist-based. The results make an important contribution to our understanding of how the world is represented in auditory and visual memory.

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