Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Can input in one sensory modality strengthen memory in adifferent sensory modality? To address this question, weasked participants to encode images presented in variouslocations (e.g., a depicted dog in the top left corner of thescreen) while they heard spatially uninformative sounds.Some of these sounds matched the image (e.g., the word“dog” or a barking sound) while others did not. In asubsequent memory test, participants were better atremembering the locations of images that were encoded witha matching sound, even though these sounds were spatiallyuninformative – an effect that was mediated by whether thesounds were verbal or non-verbal. Because the sounds did notprovide any relevant location information, better spatialmemory cannot be attributed to auditory memory; rather, it isattributed to visual memory being strengthened by thematching auditory input. These findings provide the firstbehavioral evidence for cross-modal interactions in memory.