Our Memory for Sounds is Significantly Worse than Our Memory for Visual or Tactile Things

 

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  A journal entitled Achilles’ Ear? Inferior Human Short-Term and Recognition Memory in the Auditory Modality, published by two researchers from the University of Iowa, James Bigelow and Amy Poremba, has shown that the human brain tends to remember things we see or touch better than those things we hear.

Two experiments were conducted to support this claim. In the first experiment testing short-term memory, the participants (undergraduate students from the University of Iowa) were asked to listen to a set of tones through headphones, to look at various shades of red squares, and to feel the vibrations of an aluminum bar. Each set was separated by time delays ranging from one to thirty-two seconds. The result was there is a greater decline of memory for sounds as compared with the squares and the vibrations.

In the second experiment, the participants’ memory using things they encounter on a daily basis was tested. They were asked to listen to audio recordings of dogs barking, to watch silent videos of a basketball game, and to touch common objects such as a coffee mug. A week later, the result was, the participants could hardly remember the sounds they had heard compared with the basketball game video which is nearly equal with their memory for the coffee mug, which implies that our ability to remember what we see is almost equal to our ability to remember what we touch.

This study suggests that the brain may process and store auditory information differently than visual and tactile information not unless we increase our mental repetition or use association techniques to improve our memory.

Reference: Our memory for sounds is significantly worse than our memory for visual or tactile things -- ScienceDaily. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2014, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140226174439.htm