Dual-mode presentation and its effect on implicit and explicit memory

We empirically investigated whether the auditory and visual subsystems mediating priming interact. We examined the hypothesis that processing in the visual subsystem during an implicit memory test permits access to memories in the auditory subsystem that were stored concurrently with visual memories. We did so by comparing priming in visual perceptual identification following both visual and auditory presentation (multimodal priming), only visual presentation (within-modality priming), or only auditory presentation (cross-modality priming). We focused on the comparison between multimodal and within-modality priming because multimodal priming should be larger than within-modality priming under our hypothesis. However, multimodal priming was approximately equal to within-modality priming in four experimental conditions. These results are consistent with the view that there is limited interaction between the visual and auditory subsystems mediating priming.