Running head: MODALITY EFFECTS IN FREE RECALL 1 Modality effects in free recall: A retrieved-context account Pazdera, J. K. and Kahana, M. J. University of Pennsylvania Author Note Support for this work was provided by the National Institutes of Health (MH55687). The authors would like thank Rivka Cohen for assistance in designing and programming our simulations, Tung Phan for helping to design our intrusion analysis for Experiment 1, as well as Bob Greene, Alice Healy, and Geoff Ward for providing insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michael J. Kahana. E-mail:
[email protected] MODALITY EFFECTS IN FREE RECALL 2 Abstract The modality effect refers to the robust finding that memory performance differs for items presented aurally, as compared with visually. Whereas auditory presentation leads to stronger recency performance in immediate recall, visual presentation often produces better primacy performance. To investigate these differences, we conducted two large-scale immediate free recall experiments via Amazon Mechanical Turk. In both experiments, participants studied visual and auditory word lists of varying lengths and rates of presentation. We observed a recency advantage and primacy disadvantage during auditory trials, relative to visual trials, reflecting common modality and inverse modality effects in free recall. Participants were more likely to initiate recall from recency items on auditory trials than on visual trials, though the modality effect persisted regardless of recall start location. Meanwhile, an analysis of intrusion errors revealed that participants were more likely to erroneously recall words from one list prior on visual trials than they were on auditory trials.