Modality effect

Biological Parallel

Barn owls hunting in darkness rely on auditory spatial memory—able to localize sounds within 1° in space—because sound arrives temporally (predator moving left-to-right over time) while vision is spatial (predator is there, static snapshot). Bats process echolocation returns in hippocampal auditory object maps, encoding recent acoustic information with higher fidelity than visual cues in darkness. Dolphins use acoustic signatures for individual recognition, with auditory memories persisting longer than visual identification in murky water. Spoken instructions at meeting ends stick better than visual slides because auditory processing encodes temporal sequence—what was said last carries recency advantage. This is sensory architecture: different prediction problems demanded different memory persistence across modalities.