Effects of modality preferences on learning and recall of bisensory stimuli

The performance of visual attenders and aural attenders, as defined by performance on a bisensory digit-span task, was compared on three bisensory tasks. First, in replication of an earlier study, performance was compared on a bisensory missing-unit paradigm, in which S was required to respond with missing units from two independent sets of stimuli, each set being presented on a separate channel. The results corroborated those of an earlier study in which an interaction between modality preferences and presentation modality was found. Further, differential recall patterns were found for each of the groups. While such comparable results were not found on the other two tasks, differential performance on a bisensory paired-associate task and a bisensory connected discourse task were found. The results are interpreted in accord with Murdock’s (1967) hypotheses concerning separate sensory storage mechanisms.