The fidelity of visual and auditory memory

Recent studies show that recognition memory for pictures is consistently better than recognition memory for sounds. The purpose of this experiment was to compare the fidelity of auditory and visual memory to better understand the reported differences in the two memory systems. Participants received a study phase with pictures/sounds, followed by a same-day memory test or a delayed recognition memory test. During the memory test, participants were presented with pictures/sounds that were old (presented during study), novel foils not presented during study, or exemplar foils that were variants of objects presented during study. Participants were instructed to classify each picture/sound as old or new by pressing a corresponding key. The same-day memory task revealed fundamental differences in visual and auditory memory: auditory representations are coarse and gist-based, while visual representations are highly detailed. However, auditory and visual memory performance was similar after a delay of 2 and 7 days and both types of memory representations were more coarse and gist-based. The results make an important contribution to our understanding of how the world is represented in auditory and visual memory.