How much is remembered as a function of presentation modality?

ABSTRACT

According to a widespread claim used for teaching recommendations, students remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and 50% of what they see and hear. Clearly, the percentages cannot be correct, and there is no empirical evidence for the ordering. To investigate the ordering, in a navigation paradigm, subjects were given messages instructing them to move in a grid of four stacked matrices by clicking a computer mouse. Three modalities were compared presented either once, see (visual arrows), hear (auditory words), read (visual words); twice in succession, see-see, hear-hear, read-read; or in two different successive modalities, see-hear, hear-see, see-read, read-see, hear-read, read-hear. Better performance was found for messages presented twice than once, but messages in the two modalities were not always better than twice in one modality. For the twice-presented messages, performance varied as a function of the second modality, with see best and read worst. However, the ordering for the first modality was not reliable and was inconsistent with the widespread claim. Thus, the widespread claim is clearly wrong, not only in its percentages, but also because of its lack of generality.

KEYWORDS:

• Presentation modality
• navigation task
• “cone of experience”
• teaching recommendations

Acknowledgements

We thank Blu McCormick for constructing Figure 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by National Aeronautics and Space Administration Grant NNX14AB75A.