The Effects of Auditory Shadowing on Recognition of Information Received Visually

When Ss attend to one auditory message, they have no permanent memory for a second auditory message received simultaneously. Generally, it has been argued that a similar effect would occur crossmodally. This hypothesis was tested in the present experiment for messages presented to visual and auditory modalities. All Ss were tested for recognition of information presented either while shadowing or while hearing but not shadowing a passage of prose presented to one ear. One group heard a list of concrete nouns in their other ear. Three other groups received (1) printed words. (2) pictures of objects easily labeled, or (3) pictures of objects difficult to label. The shadowing task produced a decrement m recognition scores for the first three groups but not for the group receiving pictures of objects difficult to label. Further, the shadowing task interfered more with information received auditorily than with any form of visual information. These results suggest that information received visually is stored in a long-term modality-specific memory that may operate independently of the auditory modality.