Temporal distinctiveness and modality

It has been proposed that auditory stimuli are more temporally discriminable in memory than visual stimuli. Studies using the continual-distractor paradigm have provided both supporting and contradictory evidence for this hypothesis. The conflicting reports differed, however, in the modality of the interleaved distractor tasks. The present experiments manipulated both word and distractor-task modality. Results showed that aurally presented word lists were more sensitive to temporal schedules of presentation when the distractor task was auditory than when it was visual. The same effect was not consistently found for visually presented word lists. Such an interaction may help explain the previously reported disparate findings and suggests that the auditory modality, in the presence of silent distraction, can reduce participants' use of temporal-distinctiveness information at retrieval.