Short-term retention of pictures and words: evidence for dual coding systems

The recall of picture and word triads was examined in three experiments that manipulated the type of distraction in a Brown-Peterson short-term retention task. In all three experiments recall of pictures was superior to words under auditory distraction conditions. Visual distraction produced high performance levels with both types of stimuli, whereas combined auditory and visual distraction significantly reduced picture recall without further affecting word recall. The results were interpreted in terms of the dual coding hypothesis and indicated that pictures are encoded into separate visual and acoustic processing systems while words are primarily acoustically encoded.