Visual and auditory information as determinants of primacy effects

Recent research has demonstrated that auditory and visual information have similar mnemonic properties. The relative influence of verbal, auditory, and visual stimulus materials on the primacy effect in free recall was studied. Significant primacy effects were obtained when either verbal or auditory-input stimuli were presented. However, primacy effects were suppressed when pictorial materials were used, principally because of elevation of recall for midlist and later elements. Instructions to use visual mental imagery at encoding suppressed primacy effects for verbal materials, but not for auditory materials, indicating that although auditory information processing is probably similar to phonological processing within working memory, auditory processing may share cognitive resources with visuospatial processing. Results are shown to be predictable and interpretable within the item-specific/relational information distinction of Hunt and Einstein (e.g., 1981), and within the working-memory theory of Baddeley (e.g., 1986).