Auditory and visual confusions: Evidence against simple modality encoding hypotheses

Using both recognition and recall responses, confusion and intrusion errors were obtained for briefly exposed 11-letter strings. The patterns of errors were sharply dependent upon experimental variables. In Experiment I Ss made auditory and visual intrusions with recall, but neither with recognition. In Experiment II increasing exposure time and eliminating a poststimulus cue primarily increased auditory confusions. This suggests that auditory and visual confusions reflect strategy-contingentrecoding rather than modality-specificencoding.