A retrieval account of the long-term modality effect

When to-be-remembered (TBR) word pairs are separated by distractor activity, recall of the last few audibly presented pairs is greater than recall of the last few visually presented pairs. This effect is found even after a considerably long, distractor-filled retention interval. Five experiments with 126 undergraduates were conducted to examine various new interpretations of the long-term modality effect. Results disconfirm echoic storage, short-term storage, and long-term storage accounts of these effects as well as demonstrating that the effect is not an artifact of differential use of a recency-first output strategy. Data are generally consistent with the proposition that retrieval is disrupted by modality-specific similarity between TBR items and distractor information. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).