Modality-specific Auditory Imaging and the Interactive Imagery Effect

The interactive imagery effect is one piece of evidence to indicate that mental imagery can enhance memory, but it largely has been studied only within the realm of modality-specific visual imagery. The present study demonstrates the possibility of an interactive imagery effect also being found in the auditory modality. The first experiment considered the basic question of whether an interactive auditory imagery effect can be obtained in memory, by contrasting a condition in which auditory images were generated separately with a condition where they were generated in an integrated manner. The second experiment involved a dual-task paradigm, using a concurrent auditory or visual task, to examine whether the integrated images were really created within the auditory modality or were based on visual images. The third experiment tested a possible explanation of the interactive auditory imagery effect. In general, our results show that auditory imagery shares with visual imagery the capacity of allowing efficient interactive images, but involves different processes than visual imagery. However, auditory imagery processes are different also from verbal processes typically associated with the articulatory loop.