Summary
The modality effect is to be understood as the improved cognitive ability to retain information in the sensory register as compared to the visual register for a small period of time, usually not exceeding a few seconds. When an individual hears some sequence or list, due to the modality effect, the last items of this progression are remembered much better than the first. In this laboratory work, this cognitive effect was tested using a computer simulation in which the short-term memory effect was compared between audio and visual representations of number sequences. The motivation for the choice of the research topic was the desire to explore this effect more deeply, to test it on personal experience, and to determine whether the aural mode of remembering can be considered more relevant to the author than the visual mode. The key hypothesis of the experiment was that when listening to an audio sequence, as opposed to viewing a visual one, the short-term memorization effect would be higher, as expressed in the number of correct answers.
Methods
The methodological basis of the laboratory work is the collection and analysis of quantitative data on the number of correct answers when listening to a sound sequence of numbers or observing it in visual form. The author either turned on a recording in which numbers from 0 to 9 were sounded at random, or a visual representation of such a sequence was displayed, and then was asked to arrange the blocks of numbers in the order in which they were heard: there were 18 trials in total.
List of Materials
- Headphones.
- Virtual environment for the experiment
- Audio tracks with number sequences (N = 9)
- Visual tracks with numerical sequences (N = 9)
Results
The work was aimed at comparing the effects of short-term memory of numerical information through two channels of consumption. As shown in Table 1 and Figure 1, it seems that the proportion of correct responses is almost always higher with audio information (M = 0.96, SD = 0.05) than with visual information (M = 0.88, SD = 0.04). A t-test of independent samples performed confirms the significance of the differences (Table 2), which means that the auditory way of remembering information meaningfully leads to a better memorization effect than the visual way.
Conclusions
The conducted experiment confirmed the research hypothesis of the experiment and showed that the auditory way of remembering demonstrates an increased practical value compared to the visual way, which confirms the modality effect. The total number of correctly selected answers when listening to a number sequence was, on average higher than when observing visually, and the difference was statistically significant. Based on the results, one can conclude that for short-term memory, the method of sound learning is more valid: more information will be learned more correctly. It is worth taking into account potential sources of error, namely the effect of fatigue when listening to the following sequence and distractions that disrupt attention while memorizing. In the future, an experiment could be conducted in which modality effects are evaluated for only the last 2-3 positions in sequences to assess how much better the last numbers are remembered compared to the first numbers.
Table 1. Primary results of the experiment
Table 2. T-test for comparing means
