On the influence of audio-visual interactions on working memory performance: A study with non-semantic stimuli

Several studies examined the impact of bimodal stimulation on working memory. Typically, an enhancement of participants’ performance is found when bimodal formats (a barking dog) are compared to single formats of presentation (either the picture of a dog or the sound of barking). This enhancement can be attributed to early —as automatic alerting effect—or late—as postulated by the dual coding theory—stages of processing. Since only semantic stimuli have been used until now, the nature of this phenomenon is still not clear. In this experiment, we used a n-back procedure, wherein participants were required to detect an item seen n-position before in a stream of stimuli, using unimodal (either visual or auditory) or bimodal (both visual and auditory) non-semantic stimuli. We found a significant improvement of performance for bimodal stimuli, which indicates a likely involvement of very early pre-semantic stages of memory processes.