In the classic modality effect, immediate recall of the last few items from a verbal sequence is influenced by the presentation modality: Recall is more likely if the sequence is spoken aloud than if it is read silently. Most people are familiar with the experience of briefly retaining speech as if in a mental tape recorder and occasionally using this "echoic" memory to do a double take. An example is when one is asked the time while reading. The sounds linger in memory and one can recover them to get the meaning even if one was not paying attention at the exact moment when the question was asked. The auditory modality advantage has been widely attributed to an echoic memory system that stores raw acoustic information for at least several seconds no matter how one's attention is directed during stimulus presentation.

Figure 1

Evidence shows that modality...