The influence of presentation format on the effectiveness of multimedia instructions was investigated. According to Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, Van Merriënboer & Paas, 1998) and Mayer's theory of multimedia learning (Moreno & Mayer, 1999), replacing visual text with audio will decrease working memory load and improve learning (modality effect). This hypothesis was tested in two experiments ...

In an event related potential (ERP) experiment using written language materials only, we investigated a potential modulation of the N400 by the modality switch effect. The modality switch effect occurs when a first sentence, describing a fact grounded in one modality, is followed by a second sentence describing a second fact grounded in a different modality. For example, "A cellar is dark" (vis...

Priming effects to words are reduced when modality changes from study to test. This change was examined here using behavioral and electrophysiological measures of priming. During the study, half of the words were presented visually and half auditorally; during a subsequent lexical decision test, all words were presented visually. Lexical decisions were faster for within- than cross-modality rep...