Re: Is visual or Audio information better remembered?

Is visual or Audio information better remembered?

Sorry for taking so long to answer. I guess my visual memory of reading the email was not so good in order to reply. Maybe we should try audio clips along with the email. But from reading some of the scientific literature it appears for older adults, like myself, is that it does not matter if audio and visual were tied together, we don't show a dual effect in memory.

Your question appears to be a real good one and I was surprised to see how people have conducted experiments to address this issue.

The take home appears that it depends on the type of test and significance to the person. I recall at one time watching a PBS show where they show Aboriginal people of Australia being give a test of spatial memory of different rocks in front of them as compared to city people. Well the Aboriginal people blew them away with good memory, but when given something like baseball cards or movie stars photos (I can't recall the exact details) the city kids did a lot better than the Aboriginal people. So it depends even for just spatial visual memory what the test was composed of in relation to the peoples life history.

I could imagine this is the same for music (audio). You might be able to recall the words to some music song better for songs of the same type (country, rock, hip hop) than for a different type. This could relate to melody of the music as well.

So I think it is very hard to answer this question in humans as there are so many variables because of our complex life history to control for previous exposure variables.

I think you will find the articles (below) I copied off of PUBMED of interest to you.

You can search a data base of published studies (www.pubmed.gov) using key words and obtained a number of primary articles.

All the best,
Robin Cooper

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Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2005 Jan;83(1):33-42.

Working memory, psychiatric symptoms, and academic performance at school. Aronen ET, Vuontela V, Steenari MR, Salmi J, Carlson S.
Hospital for Children and Adolescents, Child Psychiatry, University of Helsinki, Lastenlinnantie 2, 00250 Helsinki, Finland. eeva.aronen@hus.fi

Previous studies of the relationship among working memory function, academic performance, and behavior in children have focused mainly on clinical populations. In the present study, the associations of the performance in audio- and visuospatial working memory tasks to teacher reported academic achievement and psychiatric symptoms were evaluated in a sample of fifty-five 6-13-year-old school children. Working memory function was measured by visual and auditory n-back tasks. Information on incorrect responses, reaction times, and multiple and missed responses were collected during the tasks. The children's academic performance and behavioral and emotional status were evaluated by the Teacher Report Form. The results showed that good spatial working memory performance was associated with academic success at school. Children with low working memory performance, especially audiospatial memory, were reported to have more academic and attentional/behavioral difficulties at school than children with good working memory performance. An increased number of multiple and missed responses in the auditory and visual tasks was associated with teacher reported attentional/behavioral problems and in visual tasks with teacher reported anxiety/depressive symptoms. The results suggest that working memory deficits may underlie some learning difficulties and behavioral problems related to impulsivity, difficulties in concentration, and hyperactivity. On the other hand, it is possible that anxiety/depressive symptoms affect working memory function, as well as the ability to concentrate, leading to a lower level of academic performance at school.

Child Dev. 1986 Aug;57(4):1014-23. Young children's recall and reconstruction of audio and audiovisual narratives. Gibbons J, Anderson DR, Smith R, Field DE, Fischer C.

It has been claimed that the visual component of audiovisual media dominates young children's cognitive processing. This experiment examines the effects of input modality while controlling the complexity of the visual and auditory content and while varying the comprehension task (recall vs. reconstruction). 4- and 7-year-olds were presented brief stories through either audio or audiovisual media. The audio version consisted of narrated character actions and character utterances. The narrated actions were matched to the utterances on the basis of length and propositional complexity. The audiovisual version depicted the actions visually by means of stop animation instead of by auditory narrative statements. The character utterances were the same in both versions. Audiovisual input produced superior performance on explicit information in the 4-year-olds and produced more inferences at both ages. Because performance on utterances was superior in the audiovisual condition as compared to the audio condition, there was no evidence that visual input inhibits processing of auditory information. Actions were more likely to be produced by the younger children than utterances, regardless of input medium, indicating that prior findings of visual dominance may have been due to the salience of narrative action. Reconstruction, as compared to recall, produced superior depiction of actions at both ages as well as more constrained relevant inferences and narrative conventions.

J Gerontol. 1990 Jan;45(1):P1-8.

Age differences in processing information from television news: the effects of bisensory augmentation. Stine EA, Wingfield A, Myers SD.

Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02254.

Younger and older adults listened to segments of television news under one of three conditions: (a) Listen, in which they heard the auditory portion of the segment without its visual track; (b) Listen + Read, in which they listened to the auditory track only while reading along with a written transcript; and (c) Listen + Television, in which they heard the original televised segment complete with audio and visual track. Younger adults showed better free recall for the spoken information when it was augmented by the written transcript or video track; older adults did not show this benefit of bisensory augmentation. Subjects were also tested on a Daneman and Carpenter (1980) style measure of working memory processing. This measure accounted for virtually all age variance in memory performance in the unaugmented Listen condition. In the Listen + TV condition, however, there was a substantial proportion of age variance in performance which could not be accounted for in terms of working memory processing. Results are discussed in terms of the varying involvement of working memory processing in age differences as a function of input modality.

Percept Psychophys. 1995 Nov;57(8):1124-33.

Facial identity and facial speech processing: familiar faces and voices in the McGurk effect. Walker S, Bruce V, O'Malley C.

Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham, England.

An experiment was conducted to investigate the claims made by Bruce and Young (1986) for the independence of facial identity and facial speech processing. A well-reported phenomenon in audio-visual speech perception--the McGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976), in which synchronous but conflicting auditory and visual phonetic information is presented to subjects--was utilized as a dynamic facial speech processing task. An element of facial identity processing was introduced into this task by manipulating the faces used for the creation of the McGurk-effect stimuli such that (1) they were familiar to some subjects and unfamiliar to others, and (2) the faces and voices used were either congruent (from the same person) or incongruent (from different people). A comparison was made between the different subject groups in their susceptibility to the McGurk illusion, and the results show that when the faces and voices are incongruent, subjects who are familiar with the faces are less susceptible to McGurk effects than those who are unfamiliar with the faces. The results suggest that facial identity and facial speech processing are not entirely independent, and these findings are discussed in relation to Bruce and Young's (1986) functional model of face recognition.