How much is remembered as a function of presentation modality?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• A popular but unsubstantiated claim suggests specific recall percentages for reading, hearing, and seeing.
• This claim is widely used in educational recommendations despite a lack of empirical support.

Purpose of the Study:

• To empirically investigate the widely cited, yet unproven, claim regarding learning recall percentages.
• To examine the effectiveness of different sensory modalities (visual, auditory) and their combinations on learning performance.

Main Methods:

• A navigation task was employed where participants followed instructions presented via visual arrows (see), auditory words (hear), or visual words (read).
• Messages were delivered once, twice in the same modality (e.g., see-see), or twice in different successive modalities (e.g., see-hear).

Main Results:

• Presenting messages twice generally led to better performance than presenting them once.
• For messages presented twice, performance depended on the second modality, with visual arrows (see) yielding the best results and reading (read) the worst.
• The observed performance order for the first modality was unreliable and did not align with the widespread claim.

Conclusions:

• The widespread claim about specific learning recall percentages is empirically unfounded and incorrect.
• The effectiveness of sensory modalities in learning is complex and context-dependent, not fitting simple, generalized percentages.