Differential Influence of the Recall and Postlist Instruction Modalities on the Long-Term Modality Effect

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Abstract
The modality effect in free recall is enhanced memory for the last few items when presentation is auditory compared with visual. A similar modality effect is found using the through-list distractor paradigm in which each list item is preceded and followed by distractor activity. We refer to this as the long-term modality effect (LTME). We report an experiment which examined the effects of two variables on the size of the LTME. One variable was output modality, whether recall was spoken or written. The other variable was the modality (auditory or visual) of postlist instructions specifying the output modality. The LTME was robust with both spoken and written recall. Auditory postlist instructions disrupted the LTME more than did visual instructions. Discussion of these results focuses on a temporal distinctiveness explanation of the LTME.

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