Modality effects in short-term verbal memory.

Abstract

For short-term memory, auditory presentation is consistently superior to visual presentation, with the difference restricted to recently presented items. Recall increases with fast presentation rates when auditory presentation is used in a serial recall task; otherwise, recall decreases as presentation rate increases. Some puzzling findings on dichotic and bisensory split-span memory are shown to be related to aspects of the modality difference, notably the strong sequential associations in auditory memory.Recently in the area of short-term memory, a number of investigators have reported differences in recall as a function of auditory and visual presentation of verbal items. Modality differences have been reported in every short-term memory task investigated, a finding which suggests that modality effects deserve more attention. There are few variables in the study of memory which have shown such a consistent effect across a variety of tasks. Furthermore, modality effects in long-term memory have not been reliably demonstrated. As Tulving and Madigan (1970) pointed out, the disappearance of the modality effect when longer retention intervals are used poses a problem for certain theories. For these reasons, it has become apparent that a thorough review of the literature on modality effects should be undertaken with a view to examining some of the theoretical implications.Experimental comparisons of auditory and visual presentation and the theoretical interpretations of any differences found are complicated by the lack of equivalence of auditory and visual stimuli. For example, it is difficult to vary the effective presentation time of auditory stimuli to correspond with visual presentation times of 2 or 3 sec. Other examples can easily be found. The usual procedure is to ensure that both auditory and visualThe author would like to thank Edward Rowe for his comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript and Bennet Murdock for his help and encouragement.

Deaf signers and serial recall in the visual modality: Memory for signs, fingerspelling, and print

“…Although hearing subjects use a speech-based code for recall of both spoken and printed word lists, auditory presentation results in a recency advantage over visual presentation (for a review of this research, see Penney, 1975). This advantage for the more recently presented items occurs whether the experimenter or the subject reads the stimuli aloud.…”

Accuracy of temporal coding: Auditory-visual comparisons

“…The target finding is that recency following auditory presentation of linguistic items surpasses recency following visual presentation read silently (Crowder & Morton, 1969;Penney, 1975;Watkins, Watkins, & Crowder, 1974). Glenberg and Swanson (1986) proposed that this recency advantage for spoken presentation results from inherently better temporal coding for auditory than for visual input.…”

Testing visual short-term memory: Simultaneous versus sequential presentations

“…Perhaps a sequential presentation is used because experiments studying visual short-term memory often compare it with auditory short-term memory, auditory presentations are usually sequential, and experimenters wish to hold as many factors constant as possible. However, Shulman (1971) suggested the need for comparing sequential and simultaneous visual presentations; Penney (1975) suggested that a sequential presentation may not optimize use of visual short-term memory and that simultaneous presentations should be tested; and Kahneman and Henik (1977) suggested that the relevant visual analog to a sequential auditory presentation might be a simultaneous visual presentation. Therefore, the experiments reported in this paper compared sequential and simultaneous visual presentations.…”