An investigation of differences between visual and auditory memory

The main aim of this study was to examine the differences between auditory and visual memory and to investigate the encoding strategies during the recall of the unfamiliar Chinese words that was presented briefly, both visually (written word) and aurally (spoken word). Furthermore, primacy and recency effect were investigated and each stimuli was analyzed in accordance with the visual and auditory scores. The experiment took place in the psychology laboratory and 88 university students between the ages of 19-25 were selected for the experiment. The trial consisted of three parts. The first part was the learning phase. Learning phase of the trial process required participants to attend combination of visual and auditory modalities by visually monitoring the Chinese words' representations in picture format, together with textually displayed related Chinese word, and aurally, by hearing the same Chinese words in audio format. Participants were then tested with regard to their recall ability of the Chinese words in both modalities. During the auditory and visual tests in the second and third parts of the trial, the Chinese words that were presented in the first part were given one by one as a cue in mixed order without images, and the participants were instructed to write down the Turkish meaning of the words they recalled in the answer form. In the auditory test section, the auditory cue words were repeated five times over a period of time (13400 ms) as it was in the first section and participants only heard the Chinese words. Also, in the visual section, the words remained on the screen for the same period of time (13400 ms) as shown in the first part and participants only saw the Chinese cue words on the screen without any accompanying spoken word. In both test parts, all the words were identical to what they exposed in the learning phase. In order to randomize and eliminate possible differences, half of the participants were given the auditory test first and then the visual test; the other half first started with the visual test and then the auditory test. Immediately after being tested, participants were asked to describe the recall strategy they used to remember the words through a short questionnaire and all the results were analyzed. Individual differences in visual and auditory encoding strategies and their effect on recall performance were also investigated. In conclusion, the findings of this research were as follows: although it was observed that the number of correct recall in the auditory test was higher than those in the visual test, there was no statistically significant difference in between auditory and visual memory performances, the recall rates of visual and auditory information did not differ significantly by gender, in comparison of individual differences in visual and auditory recall scores, individuals whose auditory memory performance is superior to visual were predominant, primacy effect was superior in the recall rate of visual items and recency effect were superior in the recall rate of auditory items. Nonetheless, primacy effect was found as effective as recency effect in the recall of the auditory information. Furthermore, participants who used the "associated them with some other words" strategy achieved the highest level of auditory recall performance. On the other hand, "matched the Chinese characters with fruit images" strategy provided the highest level of visual recall performance to the participants. All of the results supported our hypotheses except the first and the last finding. Keywords: auditory memory, visual memory, modality effect, recall, primacy effect, recency effect, encoding strategies