Advocates of modality preference posit that each individual has a dominant sense, visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, and when new material is presented in this preferred modality, learning is enhanced. Despite the widespread belief in this position there is relatively little supporting evidence. In this study we used a “morse code” like recall task to examine how visual and auditory memory performance is mediated by modality preference, stimulus meaningfulness, and task type. When the perceptual discriminatability of visual and auditory stimuli was controlled, there was no significant relationship between performance and modality preference. Meaningful sequences were consistently recalled more than less meaningful sequences. However, when the task involved a temporal discrimination between items to be recalled, memory performance for auditory stimuli was superior to memory performance for visual stimuli. In contrast, when the task involved a spatial discrimination, the opposite effect was observed. This research suggests that the ability to recall information depends on the presence of patterns in the stimulus stream and which sensory system is most sensitive to manipulations in that domain.

Authors: Louise Hansen and David Cottrell

Event: SF08: Speed Papers

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