Numerous studies have found better memory for multimodal than unimodal stimuli. In these studies, however, multimodal stimuli consist not only of multiple modalities, but also of more varied information than unimodal. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated encoding variability as an explanation for the multisensory benefit. Written words…

The modality effect refers to the robust finding that memory performance differs for items presented aurally, as compared with visually. Whereas auditory presentation leads to stronger recency performance in immediate recall, visual presentation often produces better primacy performance (the inverse modality effect). To investigate and model these…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…