Mode of presentation, age, and short-term memory.

Female volunteers, ranging in age from 19 to 78 years, viewed or listened to prose passages and sequences of unrelated digits in an evaluation of the effects of modality (visual vs. auditory) upon short-term memory. The data indicated that performance on the digit span task was better with the auditory than with the visual presentation mode, while the opposite effect (i.e., visual better than auditory) was found with the prose passages. Although there were age-related deficits with both types of materials, the modality effects were similar for all age levels.