Free and serial recall of pictures, sounds, and words

Abstract

Pictures and sounds of familiar objects and their visual and auditory names were compared in free and serial recall tasks. The results of two experiments showed, most notably, that type of task interacted significantly with symbolic (verbal-nonverbal) and sensory (visual-auditory) modalities. Nonverbal items were remembered relatively better in free recall, whereas verbal items were superior in serial recall. In the visual modality, pictures were superior to words in both recall tasks; in the auditory modality, conversely, nonverbal sounds were inferior to words in serial recall but sounds and words did not differ in free recall. The results indicate that a satisfactory general theory of memory must encompass distinctions in both symbolic and sensory modalities as well as differences in the organizational demands of the memory task.