Can input in one sensory modality strengthen memory in adifferent sensory modality? To address this question, weasked participants to encode images presented in variouslocations (e.g., a depicted dog in the top left corner of thescreen) while they heard spatially uninformative sounds.Some of these sounds matched the image (e.g., the word“dog” or a barking sound) while others did not. In asubsequent memory test, participants were better atremembering the locations of images that were encoded witha matching sound, even though these sounds were spatiallyuninformative – an effect that was mediated by whether thesounds were verbal or non-verbal. Because the sounds did notprovide any relevant location information, better spatialmemory cannot be attributed to auditory memory; rather, it isattributed to visual memory being strengthened by thematching auditory input. These findings provide the firstbehavioral evidence for cross-modal interactions in memory.

Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the strength and speed of access to lexical knowledge (e.g., our representation of the word dog in our mental vocabulary) and semantic knowledge (e.g., our knowledge that a dog is associated with a leash) via both spoken words (e.g., “dog”) and characteristic sounds (e.g., a dog’s bark). Results show that both spoken words and characteristic sounds activate lexical and semantic knowledge, but with different patterns. Spoken words activate lexical knowledge faster than characteristic sounds do, but with the same strength. In contrast, characteristic sounds access semantic knowledge stronger than spoken words do, but with the same speed. These findings reveal similarities and differences in the activation of conceptual knowledge by verbal and non-verbal means and advance our understanding of how auditory input is cognitively processed.