An “across-the-board” modality effect in immediate serial recall

A serial recall experiment comparing visual and auditory presentation is reported which demonstrates that, under certain conditions, there is an auditory advantage in the pre-recency (1-6) as well as the recency (7-8) serial positions. Presentation modality was combined factorially with five levels of a concurrent writing task, which had to be completed for each to-be-remembered digit during presentation: NC, no concurrent task; XX, writing two crosses; DX, writing each digit followed by a cross; XD, the converse of DX; and DD, writing each digit twice. When presentation was visual, there was a monotonic (non-decreasing) trend in the recall errors going from NC to DD (in above order) for both the pre-recency and recency positions on average. With an auditory presentation, however, the trend was more gradual, though still monotonic. For the pre-recency items, an auditory advantage was obtained with conditions XX, XD and DD, but not for NC and DX. Additionally, with an auditory presentation, there was no evidence of a difference between NC and XX, nor between DX and XD. It is argued that both pre-categorical acoustic storage and residual activation effects, engendered in a logogen system (Morton, 1970) by the repetition “structure” of the concurrent tasks, helped to determine the attentional capacity available for secondary (elaborative) rehearsal and, in turn, set the levels of recall.