How Much is Remembered as a Function of Presentation Modality

ABSTRACTAccording 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. H...