Auditory-Visual Word Recognition in Short-Term Memory

Abstract

The present experiment investigated the processing of visual and auditory stimuli in short-term memoty. The subjects were confronted with two continuing sequences of words, the target and the test sequences, one of which was presented visually and the other aurally. They were required to memorize each of the words in the target sequence, and to recognize whether each of the words in the test sequence had been presented at some earlier point in the target sequence. The results showed that recognition performance was a decreasing function of the delay time between the presentation of the target and the test words, and was superior when the target suquence was presented with aurally and the test sequence was presented visually, relative to when the modality of the presentation of these sequences was reversed. On the basis of these results, processing of visual and auditory stimuli in short-term memory was discussed.